What a business would want in this case is Backblaze like functionality with versioning / restore. iCloud drive also doesn't really help you with restoring a full system like it is possible on iOS where all your settings, passwords and apps are just like you left them.
> all your settings, passwords and apps are just like you left them
Now that most of these things come from the cloud anyway, do we need the rest of the system backed up?
I don't need to restore my system from a backup - I just log back into Creative Cloud, Jet Brains, etc.
If you are someone who has tools set up, apps not from the app store, come custom dot files, your shell history and environment variables this will not help you at all and getting up and running after a device got lost / destroyed will take you a day. Even if it's just simple things like your system theme / Dock positions of your apps.
You could probably fiddle and symlink things and hope everything works but it's not a "log in and have your device be in the same condition as before" like you'd get from an iOS "Restore from iCloud" functionality.
Maybe. Some businesses just back up just their user's files and just reimage machines when something goes wrong.
Businesses like to talk up "unlimited" but it's a pain when you're using less storage but have to subsidize those using a ton of storage.
You'd save money switching to a client that supports B2, they have a list on the site, though I'm not sure which provide decent version management.
From experience, there is definite need. I spilled some water on my work laptop and it died. I was able to get a replacement in maybe 3 hours, but setting everything up again was a major pain.
A Time Machine backup would have let me continue more or less where I left off in a matter of an hour or two, vs. many hours/days (and some lost work). (not that Time Machine is perfect either, but much better than just iCloud)
I agree that getting rid of system cruft can be good, but it's better handled proactively than on machine failure IMO.
So why not macOS backups in iCloud? If anything, you'd expect it to be the other way around—in iOS devices, you/apps can't litter your homedir with random garbage, while in macOS you can. So it's more useful to back up macOS.
† You can also make an iOS backup onto a local macOS computer running iTunes, which is, I believe, what they do for you when transferring your data to a new device in store. I haven't looked at them lately, but if they're just plain-old Time Machine backups, that's even more damning, as that would imply that iCloud is already perfectly set up for receiving Time Machine backups.
Right but that functionality dates back quite a few years now, back from iTunes and before cloud computing. I'm not sure they'd build that functionality today.
Exactly as you say - what is the point of a full phone backup when you don't normally store any files on your phone? They could back up the metadata of what apps you have installed and where you've put them on your home screen. I'm not sure it's worth doing much else?
This is somewhat the reason why no full macOS backup to the cloud. iOS naturally normalizes the content due to its use of iTunes Store content (apps, movies, television shows, books, music).
On macOS, you can't necessarily just ignore apps and say you'll download from the store - not only can you move applications around, you can delete parts of them and _many_ devices have apps which were not downloaded from the store.
So a 1TB Mac backup will take 1TB of iCloud Data and require 1TB of data to be uploaded/downloaded to their storage account.
This also affects the speed of restores on higher-speed connections - a lot of the iTunes content winds up being cached by CDNs.
Apple's solution so far has been to back up just the user's Documents and Desktop folders to iCloud, since these are the two most important "general purpose" locations on the Mac.
Sure, but they're by-and-large the same apps. You can delete parts, but the parts that are there will inevitably be parts someone else also uploaded before. Apps are a highly backend de-dup-able kind of data.
As such, couldn't Apple just treat .app bundles (and a few other bundle types, e.g. .framework, .kext, .plugin, etc.) specially for purposes of iCloud backup, by e.g. content-hashing all the files in each bundle, shoving those files into an object store keyed by content hash (i.e. a Content-Addressable Store), CDN-mirroring that CAS, and then saving the .app bundle in your backup as a BOM for reconstructing the bundle from the CAS CDN?
Keep in mind, Apple have never promised E2E encryption for iCloud backups, only "encryption in flight" and "encryption at rest." (See https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202303). And even then, that's never included an implied encryption of your applications, only of "your data" (since, as you say, the apps are being turned into symbolic references to ITMS CDN objects.)
So they could have an explicit policy that certain filetypes that aren't "user-generated" would be "backed up in the open, to the commons"; while all other filetypes would get individual treatment. And presumably you could also set some Finder xattr to override that policy one way or the other, if e.g. you had some proprietary binaries you were under NDA to not release.
AFAIK Apple's backup systems do not de-dup data. Backup data is encrypted and that key never touches the data center.
Instead, they:
1. de-dup data at the local application layer, such as sharing a common link to an image for photo albums along with the encryption key.
2. de-dup the environment by scripting the reinstallation from their controlled sources (stable CDN links to immutable/integrity protected packages with privilege-reduced installation)
Many macOS apps are not sandboxed. Even apps which have native iOS ports litter crap all over the macOS filesystem. Of course, the primary offender is apps which have their own always-running autoupdater services.
My money Apple will eventually do a devteam-bound overlay filesystem for apps which have not adopted sandboxing.
> Keep in mind, Apple have never promised E2E encryption for iCloud backups, only "encryption in flight" and "encryption at rest." (See https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202303). And even then, that's never included an implied encryption of your applications, only of "your data" (since, as you say, the apps are being turned into symbolic references to ITMS CDN objects.)
I don't know if Apple wants to have more caveats to their privacy story at this point.
I suspect the best system would be the hash-encrypt-hash of Freenet, at which point the privacy leak would be in the downloading/leasing of blocks of identified material - e.g. if someone was upset about a particular app being pirated they could still court-order ask apple for information on which devices were backing that object up.
One example: apps that you built onto your device as a developer. Get a new phone and restore from backup? That app is gone now.
I do understand the reasons why. But understanding does not make it a full backup.
As a developer, I’ve modified quite a few system files and would like those things backed up. It’s one reason I don’t use Backblaze – they refuse to backup system files.
As an employer, I can imagine a situation in which those “cruft” files contain information about the actions of an employee that might be valuable in legal proceedings, or just providing they were terminated for cause.
But 98% of the time you’re totally right about not needing to backup every little config file.
I do as well. Given that such things tend to be more fragile between OS releases though and easy to forget I usually prefer to recreate them for upgrades or reinstalls anyway. Also provides an opportunity to reevaluate them. So these days I think the better way to go about it is with automation as much as possible rather than backups. That said:
>It’s one reason I don’t use Backblaze – they refuse to backup system files.
Well, you can use something like CCC to image your startup disk to a file somewhere else, and regular BB will cheerfully take care of that. Makes restores mildly more work but not much given that a failure which nukes the system files means having to do some level of reinstall/recover anyway.
I use Backblaze B2 though, which has maintained decent pricing vs S3 and is much more natively flexible. Having local systems backup to TrueNAS (or have data folders that just live there) then that go to B2 is another way to handle things. With Apple making custom restores ever more difficult though all that might need some reevaluation too :(. I miss how powerful and pleasant their tools were at one point with no subscriptions or WAN required, and will always be a bit bummed things didn't go the way of adding your own signing to the system image utility, Net Boot/Net Install etc they already had going. Macs were really great to run heavily off a LAN back around 10.5.
I stopped doing that because I don't use new systems often enough to be worth it, and as someone else said it's also a good time to examine and improve your workflow.
I started my own software consulting/contracting thing this summer and if my machine crashed, every hour I'm not working is costing me money. So setting up all my apps again to get a fresh start isn't worth it. With TimeMachine on my NAS, I just get the replacement computer and let it restore while I sleep. Then I'm good to go the next morning.
A few years ago, I had my MacBook stolen. I was up and running within a few hours after getting a new Mac and restoring from my Time Capsule. Dealing with the aftermath of a car break-in (thanks San Francisco!) and a new computer at the same time was going to be a bit much for me.