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Comment by sandreas | Hacker News Reader

I don't trust Time Machine any more. Years ago I wrote some shell scripts that help me mostly automate my complete system setup (with brew and friends). From time to time, I wipe my entire system and restore it with these scripts. Sometimes I have to adjust them, but mostly, they work without changes.

For my data backups, I use restic. Big advantage is, that I can read my backups even when I don't have a macOS system present (e.g. my only macOS system had a hardware issue and my Time Machine Backup was pretty much useless until I got a new one).

I know, this solution is not for everybody, but Time Machine corrupted my backups more than 5 times now and it feels so slow compared to restic, that I don't even think about retrying it after a new macOS release any more - even if my solution is a bit more work to do.

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People who want something similar may want to look at Arq [1]. Similar to restic, it provides incremental encrypted backups to most cloud providers (or a machine with SSH). But it is a Mac app, making it easy to configure and maintain. I never had issues with data corruption so far.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them, just a happy user for 9 years.

[1] https://www.arqbackup.com

Seconding Arq.

It's incredibly freeing to be able to dump your remote backups wherever you have space. Right now, the best for me is to send them to a virtual Linux box where I have enough space left.

It supports Amazon Drive, AWS, Backblaze B2, Dropbox, Filebase, Google Cloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, SFTP, SharePoint, Storj, Wasabi, network share or some other random S3-compatible server.

It's a native, let me repeat that, NATIVE Mac app and behaves exactly like one. Incredibly satisfying. Unlike Time Machine, it'll tell you what went right and what went wrong. I have a lifetime license.

It looks great but I suppose the downside, like a lot of nice native Mac apps, is that it seems to be Mac-only. So if you also want to back up non-Mac systems (e.g. to make off-site backups of NAS or server data), you'll need to set up, maybe pay for, and grok 2+ backup systems.

I'm more into Open Source, even if Paid solutions are easier and more reliable. But hanks for the suggestion.

There was a time when Time Machine was pretty good. But Apple became increasingly parochial about TB backups such that you cannot cull them even with root access. Any culling must be done with the TM app from the original machine that owned the files. This makes it impossible to be the sysadmin for your family's backups.

Now I use Carbon Copy Cloner, Syncthing, and Arq. My family's backups are quicker, more seamless and much easier to administer as a result.

I was trying out Restic (through auto-restic) this weekend. And I really wanted to make it work.

However, I have 2 user accounts on my macOS (mine and spouse’s) and I couldn’t get Restic to access the other account’s data. I am admin, I ran Restic as root, gave it “full disk access” - still couldn’t make it work.

Any tips?

Why not use 2 repos?

The other user is not technically savvy, so I'd like to manage these things on her behalf.

Would you be able to share those scripts? Or if not, an obfuscated/abstracted version of them?

I use brew but even with brew and brew cask, I find there's plenty of GUI apps that require manual installation, which will also have their own config spread out in various places, plus whatever CLI or background stuff I've installed myself (mostly hidden files/directories in my home folder so probably easier), system settings, etc. I don't know how I'd reasonably automate a restore of all of that stuff without having a Time Machine-style backup (essentially a disk image).

Unfortunatly, they contain too much sensitive information to provide them online and I don't have the time to make them nice and clean (it all started with a 50 lines bash script). But there are plenty of users providing macOS RICE / dotfiles...

Just a short search:

https://www.lotharschulz.info/2021/05/11/macos-setup-automat...

https://gist.github.com/bradp/bea76b16d3325f5c47d4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFlnqSqkTas

Understandable, thanks for the links.

Is your Time Machine target HFS+ on CoreStorage, APFS, or SMB?

Have you experienced the same corruption on the APFS version

What destination(s) do you backup to with Restic? I've been thinking about giving it a try.

My home nas and via zfs send the off site nas from my parents.

Just start with an external usb drive. You can pickup 8tb for under $200. If you want to go the extra step, you can buy two or three and physically swap them every N weeks. Store the older one at a different location.

Far less sophisticated than a real NAS, but also fewer moving pieces and things to go wrong.

Local NAS and backblaze. It works well.

If you're using Backblaze B2, check out Wasabi instead. I saved a good amount of money by moving.

I use Restic and backup to rsync.net. The only reason why I use them is because they use ZFS and have a admin/user account system that allows for immutable snapshots once everything is set up.

Honestly though it doesn’t matter. The backups are encrypted outside of the PC you are using Restic on. You just need a drive or a PC with storage space and SSH access that you can access.

Keep brew far away from your prod system. Everything you can‘t do in macos just use a vm. Don‘t touch the system and Timemachine will never corrupt, its that easy in my experience.

But… brew doesn’t touch the system, and never did?

Even when it used /usr/local (before the root system became hard readonly) that was an unused folder path, and it explicitly refuses to install as root.

FUD. brew has nothing to do with Time Machine corruptions.

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