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Comment by voidwtf | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Time Machine has been steadily declining. I'm not sure why there is no impetus to get it reliable and functioning well. Between sparse bundles becoming corrupt and having to start a new backup and failing functionality I haven't felt like Time Machine is worth setting up anymore. This is in stark contrast to the iOS/iPadOS backups which have worked every time.

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>It seems like Time Machine has been steadily declining.

Because they dont sell Time Capsule anymore. And they want you to backup everything to iCloud to grow their Services Revenue.

Extrapolate it one more step: Apple is clearly working on an iCloud backup for Macs, cause then that's more services revenue. While they're doing that, why would they fix bugs in Time Machine. People can't surely be using this old thing while we're working on the spiffy new thing!

The problem though is that it is likely to be complete environment backup and restore, like iOS.

But we shall see!

Hopefully they will provide the ability to backup and restore file versions!

Totally.

But iCloud isn’t a backup.

Its sync.

And it will happily sync corrupt files and does not provide any versioning.

The best TimeMachine is an SSD connected locally to the Mac.

The second best is an SSD running on a Mac setup with TomeMachine Server.

Then you are lucky if backups continue to work. And even luckier if you can sensibly restore anything via the hellscape that is the interstellar wormhole travel interface! ;-)

BackBlaze is very reliable at least! Not cheap with a house full of computers to backup though :-/

> And it will happily sync corrupt files and does not provide any versioning.

It does not even provide a basic progress bar when used on the phone.

As a non-Mac user, this sounds like a catastrophic and inexcusable bug the likes of which would inspire a dogpile of hatred against desktop operating systems with penguin mascots and/or headquarters in Washington.

That's the magic of genius marketing

Time Machine works fine. Better than anything available on Windows. I’ve used it for more than a decade and a half, with multiple restores, across multiple machines.

My current desktop Mac environment is a direct descendant of my original Mac from 2004 thanks, largely, to Time Machine.

I don’t know how many times I’ve had Time Machine decide it didn’t want to work anymore and I had to wipe the backups and start fresh to make it work again, but it’s a much larger number than it should be.

Mac OS quality control has been declining since they fired Scott Forstall, and it wasn’t amazing under his tenure to begin with.

I don't share this experience. I've been running Time Machine for years now on a Samba share for multiple Macs and if anything I've only seen an improvement. Years back I would regularly get a corrupted Time Machine sparse bundle that had to be recreated (or I would restore a previous ZFS snapshot and it would continue of off that), but it also ran over AFP back then I think, not SMB. Lately I've not have had any of these issues on any of the machines. I do have specific flags enabled in the smb.conf file that are recommended for Time Machine backups.

Have you restored from a backup during that Time? I have a similar setup (sambsa share on a ZFS NAS) and was appalled at how long it took.

Both machines on wired gigabit ethernet, yet the restore took more than 24 hours. And that was for just a 1TB disk.

The whole of desktop macOS has been steadily declining, so I‘m not surprised by this story in the slightest.

But hey, we get new emojis and moving desktop wallpapers…

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