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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Are we reading different comments? Because the only reason he had problems is because he didn't do anything standard. He futzed with his backups instead of letting the OS take care of it, and that's the only reason he had any trouble.

If you let Time Machine doing it's thing, restoring from a backup is fast and painless.

(Though it's been years since I had to restore a Mac for any reason. It makes me wonder what he was doing.)

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The reason is the opposite - he was doing the standard thing of using the substandard Time Machine for backups, which has been poorly engineered not to allow restoring without pre-pruning

> If you let Time Machine doing it's thing

Then you can corrupt your whole backup, and then fully restoring becomes impossible instead of long and painless, but possible

> It makes me wonder what he was doing

He was doing the restore recently, not many years ago

> substandard Time Machine for backups

Compared to what?

Mentioned was a pretty fundamental issue with time machine, to this day. In that it doesn't (de)allocate older backed up space to make for up space for newer back ups. This or some variations of that.

The bug may not always manifest itself I suppose which makes it worse emotionally.

I'm there setting on a 1tb backup disk dedicated to backup a 500GB root HDD, it keeps saying there isn't enough space available after 1h sorting out what needs copied over. Deleted a series a snapshot but it won't tell what doing this is saving me. I can only resort to wipe the entire backup and backup again. Now wondering, what if I deleted some documents a while back which I thought would have a snap. Do I care more about getting a fresh backup or unweilded snapshots that may or may not contain something I don't know I've lost.

I had only 600-700 gb of data on my Mac. Installed OneDrive, did not know that I had configured my NAS to do 800gb of cloud backups to OneDrive. And Time Machine downloaded that data into its backup. Although I had configured OneDrive not to download that folder to my Mac. So time Machine screwed up in the first place.

Sounds like an edge case that Microsoft didn’t think of when they developed OneDrive on Mac. You should contact them and let them know that they should exclude OneDrive from Time Machine backups automatically unless it’s configured to download everything.

You can very easily exclude folders from Time Machine backups yourself.

My point was about being able to boot from ssd. Not about whom to blame re Time Machine backup.

Ahh, I didn't see that you were the original commenter.

> restoring from a backup is fast and painless.

Had to restore recently. Was painless, but most definitely not fast. Took 24 - 36 hours to restore a 1 TB drive with < 400 GB in use after restore.

Takes me around an hour or so to restore a 2tb drive from a HDD NAS with borg. Wasn't a full 2tb, and I might be off by an hour or so as it's been a minute. Usually I dd from the old drive to the new one over USB which doesn't take too long 30-40 minutes?

I don't think that making a backup unrecoverable from is "doing its thing". I would expect a 1:1 copy of a drive to be less or exactly the drive size.

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