Comment by stuxnet79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stuxnet79 | Hacker News Reader

As a recent Linux to MacOS convert, I have been eyeing Time Machine as a simple backup solution. From reading the comments here it sounds like this is a far-fetched idealistic goal which is disappointing.

This seems to have not always been the case so where did things go wrong with Time Machine? Was there a particular MacOS release that broke everything?

Also what is really the gold standard in terms of backups? On Linux land I never had a great system. All I did was manually copy my drive every 6 months to a few external disks using clonezilla and gparted. This was tedious and not very user friendly.

Recently I learned of ZFS with its CoW approach and support for snapshots & it has piqued my interest. However while it may be a strictly superior way of doing backups its still not very user friendly. I have to budget time to learn it, set it up and of course its absolutely hopeless to expect my non-technical friends/family to figure it out.

Ultimately I'm seeking a tool that has good enough UI / UX that even my non-technical friends & family can use but supports incremental backups / snapshots along with detecting + auto correcting data corruption issues.

Does such a thing exist? Who are the big contenders in this space?

When you hear people complaining about Time Machine you can stop listening once they mention their NAS. Time Machine over the network has never been properly supported and is inherently unsafe.

Time Machine to a local drive connected via USB is great.

If you want to backup over the network you will have to find another solution.

Try Time Machine first. As with many things, the complainers are much louder than the people for whom it just works.

I’ve been using it since it came out with plenty of success. The key is to use a USB drive rather than a network drive. If the drive gets corrupted (it’s happened to me a few times over the years, although not in the last several), just wipe it and start a new backup.

Arq (https://www.arqbackup.com/) is a pretty decent backup solution for macOS (and Windows) that lets you bring your own storage. So you can let it back up to Amazon S3/Glacier, Dropbox, your own NAS with ZFS, or one of the other supported destinations.

Use Time Machine over SMB to a ZFS-backed drive. Works great, even remotely. See my longer comment elsewhere in this thread.

I used to have problems with the TM db files becoming corrupted on my NAS, but that hasn't happened in at least five years. I also have a local USB drive connected for alternating backups, but even so the NAS has been fine for quite some time.

Someone said TM was never fully supported over a network, but that's bullshit. Apple used to sell a wifi hotspot with built-in storage called Time Capsule. First party network support is different from third-party NAS support, sure. But the statement was overly broad.

(I also clone nightly to another USB drive, fwiw… And backup to the cloud with Backblaze. And left a drive with a friend last weekend for local offsites. And plan to ship another to a friend in a different geographic region in case of natural disaster. I guess you could say that the stakes are pretty low for my NAS backup, but that doesn't change that it's been solid for a good amount of time.)

I augment Time Machine with Carbon Copy Cloner. Well worth the cost.

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