Posted by rcarmo 5 days ago
https://bombich.com/blog/2024/12/19/bootable-backups-have-be...
mbentley's Docker image version of Time Machine—which I began using back when native Time Machine support was completely broken <https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/16x3ddm/my_experien...>—which the post mentions is unaffected, and continues to work with Tahoe without configuration changes.
For a professional devops person managing a custom backup solution, I agree.
For someone using mainstream consumer technology on a consumer laptop, it's not realistic to expect this. It needs to just work.
However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them.
Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can check on your backups. Even if it's just a quick test of a restored file or folders.
I don’t understand why people think this is complicated or limited only to highly technical people.
NAS units are popular with consumers now, not just tech people. They buy them with drives installed and they come with instructions to set up backups with Windows and Mac.
I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.
My impression is that companies like Backblaze and other backup-as-a-service solutions are more consumer-popular because it externalizes the complexity and pitfalls like the author is experiencing.
The problem is that the typical consumer with a laptop never uses it in a docked configuration and just plugs it in to charge.
You may as well tell someone they need to regularly plug a USB hard drive into their iphone to back up their photos.
Mounting an SMB share on a Synology NAS to use as a Time Machine backup target is not what most users would consider "consumer technology."
Your umbrance is with Synology, not Apple.
Apple raised security default configurations in Tahoe. That led to a config breakage with NAS devices which rely on relaxed security configurations.
I agree Apple should publish a technical note / changelog of config changes such as this one, but Apple has never implied to users they'd carry a support burden for any/all third-party hardware vendors. To the contrary, they've notified users that you're meant to consult with your NAS vendor for configuration steps:
> Check the documentation of your NAS device for help setting it up for use with Time Machine
I was just replying to your point that a Synology NAS "is not what most users would consider 'consumer technology.'" It's firmly in the consumer technology category.
The consumer NAS business is large. These are popular items with average consumers who understand the importance of backups.
It’s reasonable to expect it to work properly.
Regardless he should've gotten alert if backup target is unusable, not silently break
My biggest gripes with Time Machine are the lack of visibility, the silent failures and the inflexible scheduling. I know there are methods to work around the last one, but the first two are paramount. It does do consistency checking, at least as far as the logs say, but it says nothing about the health of the backup container.
While most users don't really want to know about this stuff, I feel like it's important enough to have a more comprehensive UI to provide some insight into the feature and the associated health.
It’s long past time you flipped the bozo switch on Apple, the title of your blog notwithstanding.
Most computers Apple sells are laptops. By a huge margin.
So what am I supposed to do? Put my laptop in the same spot every night, plug it in, plug in the drive, and then the next morning carefully make sure the drive is unmounted before I move my laptop anywhere?
That’s kind of ridiculous. Network storage works. Apple has supported it for years.
If they don’t want to support this, don’t let the OS do it. Until then, don’t break my backups.
Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.
If you want to backup across the network then it’s probably best to choose some third party software.
As an experiment, open Console and filter just errors and faults. Dozens to hundreds of “errors” will scroll by representing the normal operation of the system. (Either they’re not really errors and no one cares or they really are errors and Apple just leaves their systems broken). How can anyone think this is OK?
I haven’t upgraded to Tahoe. I have been a Mac power user for over 20 years, and it becomes less interesting every release. I came for Unix, the script ability, and 3ᴿᴰ party applications. Unix is an afterthought, script ability is all gated behind security gates, and modern apps seem like such a huge regression.
"Does this increase iCloud subscriptions or not?"
1) Every team does something different because none of them talk to each other. There are very few horizontal programs across engineering there. As a result, processes and results vary greatly.
2) They're very "traditional" in many ways. They're not a fast moving engineering led company, they're a slow moving business and marketing led company. Engineering is not their secret sauce (except perhaps some bits of hardware engineering). They are sometimes the sort of org that says why both with automated tests when we have a QA team.
With third party stuff, maybe you'll get lucky, but no guarantees...
3rd party monitors, or keyboards, or mice (what's a mouse?) or ...SMB devices
Also, I don't even have an /etc/nsmb.conf or /etc/smb.conf file on the mac ( Tahoe 26.3)
I think the last time I configured Time Machine for SynologyNAS I followed as many tutorials as I could and basically everything is working for both mine & my spouses machines. - until it crashes & I lose everything.
Not as nice UI-wise, but at least it's stable
Then again, SMB especially in its newer versions seems to be a protocol developed by MS with one of its goals being to make third-party implementations as difficult as possible.