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Comment by apparatur | Hacker News Reader

Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!

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Changing out the network protocol used for local network backups isn't the same thing as getting rid of local network backups.

TFA:

> Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago, and has repeatedly told us that support for its predecessor AFP will be removed in the future.

Hence "next". And by local I meant directly connected drives.

If the pattern continues, they'll announce deprecation this fall and remove the feature in 2039.

I don’t think they’re going to drop support for local backups any time soon. There are lots of enterprise customers relying on Time Machine who will never switch to iCloud. TM can also be configured via MDM settings and is a really common solution for Mac IT administrators, so it would take ages to deprecate it.

"There are a lot of enterprise customers using Xcode server". And poof, it's gone and there's now only the Xcode cloud service. It would not take ages. It would take a single release which no longer supports it. Complaints? Keep using the old one or subscribe.

I am fairly confident in saying that approximately zero enterprise customers used Xcode server. It was extremely limited and targeted at small shops which didn't see the need for a proper CI setup but had an extra machine sitting around to run builds on.

I think they switched to cloud because;

- BigCo already is a zero-sum deal, they use Xcode-cloud as a service, which runs back on their servers anyway... (Google, Amazon, Azure, etc)

- It was not a long-standing product. Introduced somewhere around 2016~ish if I remember correctly. Only lasted a few major releases. Easier to kill than an established one (ie. TimeMachine)

They switched the default protocol from AFP to SMB a long time ago.

They aren’t deprecating Time Machine. The old protocol is being removed.

The old protocol hasn’t worked well for a long time, at least in my experience

I like having control over my backups.

I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.

Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...

https://github.com/lookfirst/ResticScheduler

People have been asking for iCloud macOS backups since iCloud was introduced. It would be very popular. I'm not sure why Apple doesn't offer this, because it's easy revenue.

Because people will fill their iClouds. An important value proposition of iCloud is that customers pay for more space than they need. Time Machine grows to fill all available space.

They could sell a separate service for Time Machine backups. I'm not an Apple customers so I don't know if it makes sense, but they could make customers pay X times the last N days in the backup plus Y times a number M of snapshots in the past.

I wouldn't pay for it, so that's one data point.

I would, so that's a second data point.

The story of TimeMachine is a tragedy: a revolutionary feature that made backups accessible for normal people allowed to lie fallow for a decade or more until it's as annoying and unreliable as anything else. I now use Carbon Copy Cloner to avoid the TM headaches.

I never found it to be overly reliable. It was reliable... for a while. Then would silently fail/stop working, or just tell you that it had stopped working and that whatever you had in it was no longer accessible.

And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.

So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.

For me it was a key DB file inside the Photo library which Time Machine omitted from all backups and prevented me from restoring the library. Not fun.

Yeah, you may be right. I have fond memories of it from around 2008, but those might be from the initial experience and not all the "you need to recreate your back from scratch" errors that would crop up after a while.

It was unreliable over SMB. Not surprising when you look at what it was doing. It would create a virtual drive on the share, map that and backup to it. There was too much going on for that to be reliable.

Not really.

I've loopback mounted disk images over network filesystems for many years without any recurring issues outside of macOS. It's not rocket science, particularly if you have a reliable network connection.

I'm aware there's a long tail of possible issues that can come up, but most of the complaints I've seen amount to "I have a reliable connection and Time Machine is still a tire fire", which suggests that the problem exists outside of that particular set of edge cases.

(It seems to genuinely be that nobody at Apple really cares about network filesystems at this point - people in this thread talking up AFP makes me want to look at migrating _to_ using it for my mac's backups, because SMB on macOS randomly drops or hangs for no reason and Time Machine at least twice has just started stating the backup was completely unreadable, leading to me having to restore the backup filesystem from backups.

And attempting to use NFS on macOS somehow makes everything three times as buggy, like they special cased SMB shares to not be touched in some random "touch everything synchronously" calls throughout the OS but didn't do it with NFS shares, so Finder will now take seconds or minutes to do things that shouldn't involve that share, but as soon as you remove it, it stops doing so.)

Good nudge to look into using CCC. Which folders do you backup? It seems slower than TM so thinking of backing up home folder only

As long as you can migrate/recover your Mac from your TM backup, I guess that this scenario won't happen.

> Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!

The "new computer" out of box account creation and first sign in experience on both Windows 11 and MacOS are clearly designed to drive end users towards perpetual for life monthly recurring subscriptions for (Microsoft 365 Personal, OneDrive, iCloud storage, etc).

Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.

> Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.

To be fair, non technical folks get a lot of value from this scheme too. I can't imagine many of my relatives successfully juggling backups and external media in a way that would actually keep their content safe in case their phone is lost/stolen/destroyed.

Right now the monthly fees for this stuff are rather modest, but I could see a future where the dominant players lock out competitors and use their market position to raise prices significantly.

I would have agreed if they hadn't put in the engineering effort to upgrade the backup disk image to APFS instead of HFS+. They wouldn't have done that if the plan was to deprecate it soon. (IIRC the next version of macOS is also dropping HFS+ support)

Also it's honestly really weird that they don't have iCloud backups for Macs yet. It seems like a no-brainer feature. I know I would easily switch to Apple over Backblaze as Backblaze's client is just terrible.

This is reflexive and ill-considered FUD. Be better.

also known as "prescient"

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