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Not upgrading either, because I have, you know, real work to do. Which is something that Apple seemingly does not understand these days.

I don't care about marketing gimmicks, fancymoji, "mail stationery" or other crap. I care about having a stable operating system where I can get work done. I care about having a Mail.app that WORKS.

I think we are in an unfortunate situation where Apple's solutions (hardware+software) are far better than the competition, but still suck. And competing with Apple these days is immensely difficult: you need to have huge capital reserves (which Microsoft has), and execute well on good combined hardware+software designs (this is where Microsoft doesn't quite hit the mark).

I wish Apple had a competitor which would make "it Just Works" hardware and software. But I'm afraid we are stuck for the time being.

fix the performance issues of APFS on magnetic hard drives,

Better yet, stop shipping iMacs with magnetic hard drives. This is 2020.

SSDs still can't compete on byte/dollar. You can get 10TB of magnetic drives for less than $200 while that much in SSD will cost you several times as much. (Certainly the gap narrows for smaller drives, and most users don't need that much space, so SSD by default makes sense.)

That’s true. But I don’t really care about the performance of my external hard drives. They store movies, photos, etc where as long as the hard drive can keep up with the streaming requirements - any hard drive can - it doesn’t matter.

The other purpose is backups. Again if my backups are slow, who cares?

> I don’t really care about the performance of my external hard drives. They store movies, photos, etc

I care very very very much about the speed of the drive that stores my video files. I need to be able to open and seek through them quickly so I can find the clip I'm looking for. When you're working with ProRes stuff, this becomes a big deal.

Luckily, good quality spinning hard drives can be fast enough, at least for my needs. Unfortunately, they're only fast enough when they're not running APFS. :(

> Luckily, good quality spinning hard drives can be fast enough, at least for my needs. Unfortunately, they're only fast enough when they're not running APFS. :(

Nothing prevents you from putting for videos on an HFS+ volume and use it from Catalina. It just can't boot from one.

Good point—this conversation got a little muddled. I actually use either ZFS or NTFS + Tuxera for external drives on Mac, which works great (especially ZFS).

Just listing a bunch of photos is going to have terrible performance on APFS. They don't need to make it work amazingly on hard drives, but they need to do some basic things like lumping together related metadata.

What benefits do you really get from using APFS on external magnetic disks that are really so significant that you wouldn’t just use HPFS?

Snapshots are always good.

No but these are low end machines, the bottom of the range. There is no option to upgrade them to 10TB.

What about the macs which shipped with magnetic drives? What should the owners do, when Mojave support runs out?

A 1TB sata SSD costs about $120. Worthy upgrade on a +$1000 machine imho.

I completely agree with you, but it's very difficult to replace the 2.5" drive in recent iMacs, and Apples price for the SSD is unfortunately not $120.

In my opinion the base included option should be a reasonably sized M.2 SSD, with an option to increase the size of said M.2, or to add a 1TB (or larger) 2.5" drive as an extra if more storage is needed.

Replacing the HDD on an iMac is non-trivial. This is not only due to the fact that you have to unglue and then re-glue the screen, but there is also a non-standard thermal sensor on the Apple HDDs which you need to circumvent when putting a standard SSD in which doesn't have that sensor (if you don't, the iMacs fans will always spin at 100%).

It’s a desktop. Why replace the drive instead of just using an external drive? I could understand not wanting to lug around an external drive with a laptop.

And how exactly do you use an external drive? Due to the limitations of the internal drive, I have used quite a variety of external drives with my iMac, but no solution is really good and all are much inferior to an internal drive. USB 3 drives work the best, but are limited and speed as is the number of USB ports on the mac. Going via hubs is possible, but reduces the reliability of the connection, I keep getting drive disconnects. Also, I haven't really been able to find a reliable Thunderbolt 2 drive.

What’s wrong with the higher end TB2 SSD drives/enclosures?

Which ones? Can you list one, which doesn't disconnect from time to time without unmounting the file system? I used a thunderbolt enclosure from OCW and eventually the file systems were corrupted beyond repair.

I’ve never had that problem, using a Buffalo drive station mini (which I upgraded the 2 SSDs without issue either), neither with Akitito thunderbolt 3 4-bay thing. Both products are discontinued though. People complained about the Akitito one disconnecting on Amazon, from memory someone said the cable was a bit loose. I used an Apple thunderbolt cable from the beginning (because someone left out the included cable and it was coming from the US to NZ over Christmas...) and I dunno if that plays a part, but it’s snug and I’ve never had an issue.

I would not want to be booting off an external drive.

Why not both?

Keep using HPFS...

Supposedly, Catalina does not boot any more from HPFS, so how is this good advice?

In the context of where you store photos, videos, etc where you want to be able to use massive cheap magnetic media you would use an external hard drive. You would still boot from your internal hard drive. If you have a Fusion drive, more than likely the OS would be on SSD. If you were unfortunate enough to have the cheapest iMac with only magnetic hard drives - it would still be less of a pain and more performant to buy a small SSD external drive as a bout/app drive and an external magnetic drive running HPFS.

fix the Time Machine issues

Can someone please point out what the issues are? I am not challenging this statement, it is just that I am not aware of any specific issues with Time Machine so I am a bit worried about any problems (and if there is anything I can do to mitigate the risks). I am using a separate, third party cloud backup but I still count on Time Machine for day-to-day operations.

Thanks in advance to anyone that could give me more info about this.

In my own case, TM lost the ability to make new backups to an USB-connected HD. It doesn't report errors. It doesn't explain. Trying to find something useful in Console is a PITA. The only visible symptom is that a few minutes after each backup starts, it ends without copying all that it promised at the start of the process.

I suspect the root cause is some 3rd party software interaction. But since the 3rd party software I have is installed and required by my employer, it's hard to do an A/B comparison.

Thanks a lot for your contribution. You write:

"The only visible symptom is that a few minutes after each backup starts, it ends without copying all that it promised at the start of the process."

So you mean it ends "too quickly"? How can you tell if it missed some files?

i had the same problem which was fixed by having more free space on my local drive.

I need + 15 gb free for TM swap stuff.

Apple is notorious for not giving ANY feedback so i only found out after sesrching for a long time on google.

Apple please stop silently failing without messages.

I've lost my backup twice. OS says I have to redo the full backup because there's something wrong with it. I have a Time Capsule.

If I understand this correctly it corrupted an already existing on-going Time Machine backup so that you had to start just as if you had bought the Time Capsule? And this was made explicit by an OS error at the end (or at the start) of a backup operation?

If TM detects an I/O error while writing to a networked backup volume, it aborts the backup and forces a filesystem check on the remote disk image at the start of the next backup. This fails, because the filesystem actually is corrupt and has been for some time. You had no idea, of course, because TM only reports four-horsemen level errors in the UI, and silently eats the rest. You even had a good run of "successful" backups afterwards, so long as you managed to avoid changing any files in directories with damaged metadata in your backup.

Anyway, as your digital life flashes before your eyes, TM helpfully offers to delete all your backups and start with a fresh disk image now, or delete all your backups and start with a fresh disk image later. And you can't blame it, really, because the filesystem has had some unknown, nonzero amount of corruption for an unknown, nonzero amount of time. For all anyone knows or can prove, the whole backup is random garbage.

This fractal of failure is specific to backups over WiFi. Backups to USB-connected disks aren't that reliable either, because HFS+, but USB backups have all the nines of reliability compared to network backups.

That wasn't introduced by Catalina though, it has been there since forever.

For what I understood it happens when the macbook is forced to go to sleep/loses connectivity while in the middle of a backup. It doesn't cleanly unmount the remote file system and it causes data corruption.

There are some ways of "restoring" the remote FS but they may or may not work, are very slow, opaque (what actually was fixed?) and flaky.

I just switched to an external USB drive for Time Machine and not looking back

I have been bitten by Time Machine in the past. There is not much more frustrating than a fried computer and a backup that doesn't work and can't be recovered.

Since then I only use Carbon Copy Cloner [0]. It has very very very excellent documentation and it is well the worth the purchase. The documentation covers lots of backup scenarios, how to do recovery and dealing with error cases. It also lets you create bootable backups on external drives, though I have only used it for backups over the network.

I'm not affiliated, but I can't praise their work enough.

[0] https://bombich.com/

Thanks, but I wanted to understand what the actual problems of Time Machine are, especially with Catalina, and - most importantly - which are the symptoms I should be wary of.

Apologies, I haven't heard of anything and I haven't dared upgrade yet either. Good luck!

Well one problem I ran into was because of the changes to iTunes audiobooks are now stored in the Books app but the Books app doesn't support external drives for media so the Catalina update includes hours of copying files from my external HDD to my primary Macintosh HD - filling it up almost entirely (I have/had about 300GB of audiobooks) - this was bad enough (as their was no UI telling me it was doing this) but then Time Machine kicked in trying to back up these files (I had excluded the external drive but obviously not the primary partition) but because I ran out of space during the initial Catalina upgrade run, their were lots of artifacts which also got added to Time Machine. Time machine itself started trashing for hours.

I lost probably a day (to a day and a half tidying things up and cleaning up stuff that was not my fault) and of course I have no decent way of managing audiobooks now.

For backups, you can simply use rsync. No reason for proprietary solutions when rock-solid opensource alternatives exist.

Yeah, no. CCC goes way above and beyond. Creating verifiable, bootable copies, being able to bundle tasks together, creating recovery volumes, being able to backup locally, remotely or to images etc etc.

Rsync is a good tool but CCC gives massive quality of life. Some of that won’t even be possible with rsync. And rest would require building a complicated set of scripts. Paying Bombich, to deal with all the headaches and mac os shenanigans, $50 every couple of years is a much better deal.

And its not a lock-in like other backup tools. You can access specific files inside the backup without CCC.

CCC + Arq cover all my bases when it comes to backup and restore.

A significant portion of my hard drive has been completely eaten up by old backups that I can’t seem to remove. I have tried every solution that google provides, there doesn’t seem to be a way to erase these old backups without doing a factory reset.

A bit late on the reply, but here are a couple of places to look – "Time Machine and Backing Up in Catalina". [1] Also see mjtsai.com for Time Machine related posts on Catalina.

[1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2019/11/11/time-machine-and-backing...

I’m surprised that nobody here is talking about this... Federighi and co had an internal mea culpa and announced some big changes to the way their internal development works. All signs point to this years releases being “snow” versions.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios...

> one feature release a year, followed by (another) one whole year for stabilization and tiny incremental improvements.

In theory this is more or less what they have been doing (with both iOS and Mac), they just have been batching up the stabilization and slapping a whole new version number on it. But I don't disagree.

This is one of the big reasons why Snow Leopard is legendary as a favorite OS X (now macOS) release - it focused on reliability and performance rather than adding new features. I wish more software would follow that sort of major release cadence!

Catalina could certainly do with a refinement release for internals (e.g. APFS) as well as UI polishing.

Disclaimer: I've been using Catalina as my main OS since it came out.

I said the same thing about Apples QA. I highly doubt they even do half the QA that the Ubuntu team does. It's like Apple is so cheap that they treat their users as their personal QA. They also don't like users who are a bit more advanced tech wise so they don't try to test what they may do. It's like they only want to sell to morons and suckers. Security wise I get that downloading something off of the internet is risky, but why the hell are you telling me that KNOWN gpl software downloaded from legitimate and verified sites could potentially be harmful? They treat their machines as a point of contact for the sake of making more money by channeling less savvy people through ways that require you to pay for something.

fwiw it's nice to say this stuff but 2020 features have long gone been decided. on the schedule they are 2/3 done with feature development already.

I have been using Catalina on my dev machine since the public beta and have none of the issues you claim. Catalina is my favorite macOS yet. Just because it doesn’t work the way you want doesn’t mean Apple messed up.

Conversely, the fact that it works for you doesn't preclude it being buggy, or problematic in other ways, for other people.

Does losing data when people use a product like they always do also count within the scope of "doesn't work the way you want" and mean that Apple didn't mess up?

I don't understand the motivation of "works for me" comments like this.

Is your point that you believe other people are just hallucinating their problems, or that you believe they've 'used it wrong' and brought problems on themselves, or that if you personally haven't experienced a bug, then it's not an important bug?

> Is your point that you believe other people are just hallucinating their problems...?

It happens when the sightings are emotional. For instance:

The Colorado Mystery Drones Weren’t Real

The mysterious drone sightings that captured national attention were a classic case of mass hysteria.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884xv3/the-colorado-myste...

Flip side of same phenomenon is the "snappier" meme.

I personally like seeing the “works for me” posts. It helps me gauge if the reported problems are universal, or just hitting a subset, which helps me decide when to roll the upgrade dice.

BTW, I did finally upgrade to Catalina last week and it’s been going fine, with the exception of losing 50% of my Steam library to the 32-bit graveyard....

I believe the vast majority of people, even those on hacker news, have no idea how their computer works. Mosy of the time PEBKAC is the problem.

When someone loses their data because they don't know how to use a computer it is easy to just blame the vendor.

Nobody was complaining of the changes here but the fact that Catalina is littered with bugs. It’s absolutely impossible that the bugs somehow function well on your Catalina installation. I suspect you’re either a fanboy and that you put your judgement after your pride or maybe you are a light user and didn’t run into these bugs