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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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