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Comment by oherrala | Hacker News Reader

I have been back-and-forth between Time Machine and switching to something else. I'm still using TM, but what alternatives do I have? Any recommendations?

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I’ve gave up with Time Machine and switched to Carbon Copy Cloner (https://bombich.com). Not coming back.

Solid well-maintained software. One nice differentiating feature is that it fully supports bootable backups.

Me too. It just works

SuperDuper

the interface is a bit weird but works well enough

Arq + B2 is fantastic for me!

My setup too. The cost is so cheap. I also run Time Machine for local backups because I have spare disks.

I have been using Arq for years. Locally over SSH to our NAS, remotely with B2 as well. I have done many restores over those years, both when installing a new machine or when I lost some file. It's really awesome, especially because it's decoupled from any storage vendor. You just buy a license and choose where you want to store backups.

On Linux I use restic, which is also great, but on macOS Arq is just more seamless.

I use restic on my Debian laptop and I think that it misses a GUI to be perfect.

I am fine with using the CLI for setup but unless I closely monitor systemd timers, backups could be failing silently and I would not notice.

Indeed! I also have a setup where the secrets come from the pass password manager, which I use with a hardware OpenPGP token. So, I get these global PIN dialogs once gpg-agent expires the PIN, which is quite annoying :(. Not sure though how to solve this nicely without making the secrets to visible to the rest of the system.

Also using Arq + B2, though it's much better with a high speed internet connection. On a 1Mbps max upload speed it was sometimes painful and had problems, with my new 20Mbps upload it's great.

I trust my SuperDuper local backups much more though. SuperDuper is amazing.

That's what I use.

Arq is great, but my quibble with it is that, like all third-party backup solutions, it relies on scanning the file system. Any such program, Arq included, will take a very long time to run on a hard drive where absolutely nothing has changed.

What Time Machine does is use macOS's local database of pending changes, FSEvents. On the next backup cycle, it knows what's changed and doesn't need to scan unless the FSEvents database is missing or corrupt.

I'm looking forward to a time when Time Machine can take advantage of file system snapshotting, which apparently was a design goal for APFS. Snapshotting is used for Apple's Software Restore function now, but the Time Machine parts weren't ready for Catalina [1].

[1] https://eclecticlight.co/2019/08/16/are-we-ready-for-time-ma...

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