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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

I wish they'd build iCloud to store my Time Machine backups.

Agreed.

I'm utterly baffled why my iOS backups can live in Apple's cloud but not my Mac ones.

I honestly expected them to launch it years ago. The fact they still haven't seems to mean they've firmly decided not to for some reason, but I'm totally clueless as to what the reason could be.

Especially when making more money off services is a strategic priority for the company.

I'm mildly surprised they haven't, but the reasons seem pretty obvious. Redundancy (in offerings), storage costs, and home network upload speeds.

Redundancy because the thing most people care about backing up is media and important documents, which are likely already stored in iCloud. If you care about Time Machine back ups you probably want your whole filesystem with point-in-time restores. That's a lot more data for Apple to hang onto, for a small segment of its target market. Of course, Apple does have 2TB+ iCloud+ plans, but I would bet that the average iCloud+ subscriber is using nowhere near their limit.

> Of course, Apple does have 2TB+ iCloud+ plans, but I would bet that the average iCloud+ subscriber is using nowhere near their limit.

But that's my point. To sell the 2TB plans to people who are merely on the free 5 GB or paid 50 GB plan.

And yes -- I don't even keep many files on my Mac, it's mostly in the cloud already. But if it gets lost/stolen, I want to restore all my apps and preferences the same way I do with my phone. Which is why I use Time Machine with a NAS, but it's silly to need a NAS at all. I just want to use the cloud.

I agree with you here and that's why I'm mildly surprised they haven't come up with a solution rolled into iCloud yet. Syncing apps and preferences shouldn't be that difficult, but unless they're App Store applications the binaries would take up a lot of space. Most of the apps I care about are from outside of the App Store. AFAIK our iOS backups don't actually back up application binaries.

The way I was looking at it is that Apple has successfully sold iCloud+ 2TB plans to a lot of people who don't need much more than 200GB. If everyone on the 2TB plan used even close to 2TB, I'd bet they'd have to charge me a lot more to make up the provisioning and usage costs of storage.

Wonder if there are economies of scale storing multiple users' backups that may partially contain a lot of the same data. If 10000 separate users' backups contain the same 10GB app binary...

Yeah, I mean Time Machine backs up the entire OS as well.

I would have no problem if Time Machine separated out OS and known signed application packages and basically just stored pointers to standard versions of them, as long as all that detection is done client-side.

There's no reason the backup would need to store anything but the list of those files (that list being encrypted), and then everything unique to me -- my configurations, my files, etc.

I haven't bothered with this in a while, but back in the day, I used to use Carbon Copy Cloner to get a true 1:1 backup. Time Machine was never exactly the same.

But apple charges for storage space? Surely people needing more storage is a huge plus for Apple. Maybe they had worries about scaling storage capacity? A company like Aple could certainly figure it out though so that seems unlikely

My point is that I'm sure the only way iCloud is profitable or even break-even for Apple is if they rely on over-provisioning storage to users of the more paid plans. I started paying for the 200GB iCloud+ plan, and once my photos exceeded 200GB I ponied up for the 2TB plan. Unless I take up a photography hobby it'll be a long time until I get close to that 2TB, and I'd wager this is what Apple expects. Raising that baseline usage with Time Machine backups would mean it would need to be more expensive for end users, either by making iCloud+ more expensive or rolling out a new subscription product.

> it'll be a long time until I get close to that 2TB I thought the same thing until I realised that, with Family Sharing and a house with teenage kids sending each other embedded videos in iMessage, the time wouldn't be that long...

Suddenly I find myself 1TB in, and desperate to find a fix!

There's an interface on the phone to sort message attachments, by size, and delete -- exactly to reclaim that space.

On the other hand, that would require convincing your kids to do that...

Boot them out of family sharing and get them to pay for it themselves

Ninja economics for the win.

But sure then -- just charge more, or a new subscription product as you suggest just for Time Machine. They can even tie pricing to the size of your Mac's disk if they want. They can definitely make the economics work if they choose to.

At one org, we went for the highest-tier Google Drive plan (with unlimited storage), because we've had this 1% of our internal users who would really, really benefit from having it. We could only go all or nothing (and the lower tier would meet the needs of the 99%), but the cost-benefit of enabling it for everyone was still pretty good.

I suppose Apple is keeping track of these numbers as well (keep in mind they know exactly how much storage each Mac has - because you can't expand it). I am also hoping it's under intensive internal testing; the quality of their software has been going downhill for a while, no power user would ever care if they shipped another broken product.

> you can't expand it

They’ve brought back SD slots in recent years: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102352

Even better, external NVMe SSD enclosures over Thunderbolt 3 can reliably read at 2500 Mbps and write at over 1500 Mbps. That's faster than internal SSD R/W speeds a few years ago. The newer generation of enclosures coming out claim to use the full bandwidth of USB4, 40 Gbps, and get >3000 Mpbs R/W.

Neither this nor an external SSD are very practical - ask me how I know.

Meanwhile NVMes are a dime a dozen, and some laptops can fit two.

> I'm mildly surprised they haven't, but the reasons seem pretty obvious. Redundancy (in offerings), storage costs, and home network upload speeds.

I'd bet that the rigid APIs on iOS also play a huge role here. Compared to the "anywhere you have permission to `open()` on disk" approach on macOS, iOS developers don't have as many options for where/how to store data. This probably makes backup / restore an order of magnitude simpler / reliable.

It isn't as polished as whatever first-party solution Apple has the potential to develop, but I just use OneDrive to restore my personal data + chezmoi to reprovision my dotfiles and it works pretty well.

About every six months I do a fire drill and completely factory reset my macbook. Takes about 10 minutes for me to go from a fresh device to one that has all my apps, data, and developer tools ready to roll. Only annoying thing you can't really automate is signing into services like OneDrive or Dropbox, but this isn't a problem if you use iCloud Drive.

https://github.com/eh8/dotfiles

I’ve rebuilt using brewfiles a few times. Surprisingly painless.

Perhaps it’s because iCloud is based on AWS and Azure and the economics don’t make sense at this scale?

I'm sure Apple is getting excellent rates unavailable to you or me.

If anybody can decide to start building out massive datacenters of their own, it's Apple, and AWS/Azure know that.

And Apple just passes its rates along to the consumer. It costs what it costs.

The overwhelming majority of Apple's cloud operations are in Apple-owned data centers.

Same here, but the “lots of Cassandra instances” approach isn’t really oriented for continuous versioning. One may notice the availability lags with the current iCloud implementation which sometimes come across as inconsistency.

I don’t have that kind of bandwidth and I’m a developer.

It’s the Hanlon’s at work.

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