Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphaomegacode | Hacker News Reader

As an anecdotal example that may be relevant, I wanted to upgrade to Monterey and my Mac Mini said there wasn't enough room.

Hooked up a Western Digital external drive that I had used on previous Macs and launched Time Machine. And that's when it started. Time Machine presented what seemed like a stack of Finder windows in the middle, a timeline with hash marks on the right-side and the only button highlighted was the "Cancel".

No menu, no other actionable buttons, no right-click menu. Nothing. So after hitting various key combos and mouse buttons, I decided that my 30+ minutes trying to use Apple's built-in backup software to backup a few folders was better spent finding 3rd party software.

And that was another user experience fail in my opinion for Apple and any "total quality" experience.

And that's not even talking about Safari or XCode or Pages or Numbers or iBooks not syncing and so many others.

View on HN

Time Machine's insane UI isn't an example of Apple's software quality slipping; it's basically unchanged since it first shipped 14 years ago. It's more of just an example of how Apple's software never was as good as some people would like to pretend.

When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "keybote-driven development" where everything was made to look great in and keynote presentation to an exec. If it looked great you got the go ahead to finish it and ship it, and if not it got skipped. There are a lot of things to like about this approach. However, Time machine's UI to me feels like a quintessential blind spot of this incentive structure, where it looks visually striking and cool but actually using it for real use cases it often falls flat quickly. To update it you would need to fit the motivation and payoff in a keynote presentation and it's hard to do so.

Big yikes.

Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength? That was hardcoded for the purpose of the Keynote. I recall iPhones having iffy phone reception for at least the first couple of years.

> Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength?

With the help of therapy and psilocybin I got over that in 2016.

Not AT&T, but Cingular. Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched.

> Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched.

It was “gone” in the sense that it was renamed “AT&T Mobility”. (Cingular Wireless bought AT&T Wireless before the iPhone deal, but its parent company [SBC] later bought AT&T, adopted the AT&T name, and rebranded Cingular as AT&T Mobility.)

> When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "key[n]ote-driven development"...

> Big yikes.

If Apple's products are essentially sold via a "keynote", it makes sense to have a keynote presentation as the internal hurdle as well. If it can't be presented in way that looks like something people want to buy, there's no point in moving forward with the project.

Yeah but this is the classic type of bureaucratic effort-justification hurdle that leads to tech debt or just general crappiness never getting improved.

What do you hate about Time Machine?

I've used it since 2013. Every time I've bought a new MBP, I simply use time machine to restore and my new one looks exactly like my old one. Never had an issue.

I find it far easier to use than Duplicity, Iron Mountain ConnectedBackup, or Carbonite, all of which I've used at other jobs. (All of those require fine-grained backup tweaking that requires a lot of diligence to check boxes and set policies, and then fuss with awkward dialogs when trying to recover... duplicity is so effing weird... Time Machine just works and the time scroll seems very clever compared to the other three.)

I'd be interested to hear your problem(s) with it?

The specific complaint was "the insane UI," if I read the comment correctly. Time Machine's UI is possibly the last holdover from Apple's peak sizzle-and-flash design days, the era of brushed metal and skeuomorph-all-the-things even when there isn't exactly a real-world analogue to emulate.

To be fair, it's less insane in Monterey than it used to be. No wooshy space background, faster to launch, easier to scroll. But do we really need the "stacked window" view, for instance? Was that chosen originally because it's clearer than choosing a backup date from a dropdown menu, or was it chosen originally because we wanna look like we're using a sci-fi machine to GO BACK IN TIME woooo? I mean, we know the answer here, right?

If you rotate your wallpaper every week or so it actually ends up being a pretty cool visual indicator that's probably more memorable for some people than a drop-down menu would be.

Ideally we'd have both obviously. The big issue with it for me is that it has a timeline on the right with each backup by date so you don't have to do the stacked windows, but there's no labels to indicate the span of dates. It only has a label on dates when you had backups but there are no labels to orient yourself in time when you start rolling back.

Ah that's fair. The "Space Rolodex" theme is a bit motion-sickness inducing.

I find that useful because I can navigate to a folder where it used to live, and then flip back until the file I was looking for appears.

Compared to the alternatives: Connected Backup and Carbonite require me to manually enter dates until I find the file, and for a while Carbonite would keep closing the folder tree requiring me to re-expand every branch each time the date changed. However, duplicity requires me to dump the entire log and grep, which is a power user solution one could argue.

I think duplicity wins here because I can grep for the filename. But barfing Mac Rolodex can be helpful if I don't know the filename.

I think your difficulties may stem from thinking of Time Machine as a backup application, when the UI is designed around treating it as a core system component. The configuration is all handled through System Preferences, and the UI you entered was solely for viewing and restoring files from your backup archive. You probably also missed a prompt to use the drive for Time Machine backups when you first plugged it in.

Also, Time Machine is intended for full system backups, and using it for just a handful of folders not as easy as using it for everything.

Yea, the mistake encountered by the OP is that they were approaching the Time Machine UI with the intent of "I want to back up some folders".

The TM UI is solely about recovery. It backs up "everything" not on the "skip list". And out of the box it defaults to just the system drive (vs the system and external drives).

And that's an interesting facet here. This is a case of going in to a bookstore and scanning up and down the shelves and not finding what you want, and being frustrated, because you don't realize that you're simply in the wrong section. The TM UI in this case was frustrating because it had no options to do what the person wanted to do. And by design, it would not do what they wanted to do.

It's not a UI fault of TM per se, specifically this aspect of the TM experience. TM excels at full drive recovery, and recovering "a few, select" files. In the middle, it's not so good.

It's worked great for me. I've recovered from it several times, both entire systems and a few files. I use it solely on my main drive, and I use BackBlaze for the entirety of it all as a hat tip to offsite DR.

Over the years, I've lost a couple of TM volumes to strange corruption. Not that much of a crisis, I just reset it and start over.

Time Machine has been neglected for so long. The UI was never great for power users, but at least it worked. For a novice computer user it was a pretty good "set it and forget it" experience. In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable (every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created) that I've given up and switched to Carbon Copy Cloner.

Keyword here: Neglected.

At this point, my decision to use a particular piece of software or a specific feature within an OS/App/Website/etc based on perceived risk of that software being neglected.

Usually you can make this call based on features being added, but most of the time it's a gamble.

It's too bad, because it could be a set-it-and-forget-it solution if it were more reliable.

I gave up and wrote a Python script that calls Borg Backup. At least it's more customisable.

Ever since they stopped building wireless routers, Apple has forgotten Time Machine in favor of pushing iCloud backups for separate services.

But there’s still no good alternative to Apple’s old routers. I tried to buy a new router for gigabit internet last year, and the interfaces are so piss-poor and the performance so pathetic across the board that I ended up getting the last generation of Airport Extreme instead. I get 800ish down, 500ish up on wifi, so as far as I can tell I’m not missing out on anything aside from 6E, which my devices don’t support anyway.

I really hope Apple starts making routers with Apple Silicon soon. With incorporated Time Capsule backups, too. That’s the only way that they’ll stop neglecting the software.

The home networking scene is so bad. I had a Time Machine and and Airport Extreme, but it was not capable of PPPoE login to Centurylink's network, and I wanted to get rid of the Zyxel router that Centurylink provided.

I ended up getting a Linksys Velop MX8400C 2 pack from Costco for $230, since that was the lowest price I could find for something that did PPPoE login and could be hardwired together. I wanted the ability to do multiple VLANs via wireless like Meraki, but I could not find anything. Even the Meraki Go stuff does not do it.

Most people will just bridge mode the modem from the ISP to their router so that the router itself doesn't have to authenticate, which is probably why most home routers don't have PPPoE.

Actually, I miswrote, it is PPPoE login with VLAN tagging that you need to login to Centurylink’s fiber network.

I guess the apple time capsule and airports were too old to get that VLAN capability, since they stopped being made 5+ years ago.

A lot of the new home routers have the ability to PPPoE with VLAN tagging though.

I can highly recommend Eero. They Just Work, and they work much better than Apple's networking ever equipment did.

I just replaced the previous generation of equipment in my partner's house (1920's plaster and lath construction) with a set of eero6s. A set of four gives full strength signal throughout the entire place (including the basement)s and all of the outside areas. (Not really that impressive though because it's a small lot.)

There's no drop at all as you wander from zone to zone.

Many years ago I worked at a place where we all had external drives plugged into cinema displays that acted as Time Machine drives for our laptops. The backups regularly failed, OSX would suddenly decide it didn't like it and you'd have to clear it and start again. I don't believe Time Machine could reliably cope with drives that were periodically disconnected perhaps. I had the same problem with a NAS device and my personal mac, it would periodically just decide the backups were screwed.

> In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable (every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created)

This bit me and I've not fully recovered yet. I had some stuff backed up manually, but some stuff I just trusted to the time machine backups. Now that some of the backups are unrecoverable I only have easy access to the stuff I backed up manually. I'm interested in trying CCC, but part of the reason things went south for me was apparently due to closing my laptop mid backup to a network TM volume and I'm curious if CCC can handle that any better. Do you use CCC for network backups and have you ever had issues with it?

My condolences. It is an absolute nightmare trying to find any documentation for dealing with time machine issues. I ran into that once and will never do it again if I can avoid it.

I have been super happy with CCC. I use it to back up my Macbooks to my NAS. Sometimes wired, sometimes wireless. And yes, it doesn't break when it gets interrupted. And their documentation is amazing. All the use cases and error cases are documented with solutions and everything.

I think I had two or three recoveries so far and have been happy with it. Even when it didn't work for some reason their documentation had workarounds.

Same here. CCC is several orders of magnitude faster than Time Machine and it just works.

I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to delete old backups.

And then they came out with APFS which didn't support the directory hardlinks which Apple invented and Time Machine depended on. WTF Apple?

> I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to delete old backups.

You can no longer do that, AFAIK. Not even from the same user account or from root, since TM volumes are set by APFS as read-only except to Time Machine itself.

> every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created

I had that problem repeatedly, but used the same backup drive with Monterey and it worked flawlessly, with better feedback (TM's menu gave a percentage on the pre-copy, "counting file changes" stage), so I was pleasantly surprised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com