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Posted by rcarmo 5 days ago

TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe(taoofmac.com)
231 points | 150 commentspage 3
burnt-resistor 5 days ago|
I still don't understand why people insist on spending good money on a closed, proprietary appliance when they can run a general purpose, flexible server such as running Samba and NFS that can be tweaked to solve a variety of edge-cases that no closed system can match.
fragmede 4 days ago|
time > money
nodesocket 5 days ago||
I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe. Seems to work fine with no local configuration changes. Just make sure in SMB global configuration you:

- Enable Apple SMB2/3 Protocol Extensions

And when creating the SMB share select Time Machine for purpose.

vivzkestrel 5 days ago||
- they blew 2 of my hard drives so far. you keep it connected and it used to do hourly backups except now both my hard drives are dead

- i am too afraid to buy another one and connect only to find out the SSD gets killed in another week

- Anyone knows about this issue?

varenc 5 days ago|
you're probably backing up things that change very often you don't care about? Figure out what's taking up space in each backup and use `tmutil excludepath -p <dir>`.
vivzkestrel 5 days ago||
i excluded a whole bunch of things, i did not run out of space. my SSD actually blew up. it has become unusable, i cant even open it anymore
varenc 3 days ago||
Damn... my only guess: time machine backups are VERY write heavy. Is it a reputable brand of SSD? Is time machine frequently erasing old backups? Many external portable SSDs that work fine for regular consumer uses, might struggle to handle the write volume of time machine backups. I've used 2 external SSDs with time machine and never had them fail. (T7 Samsung SSDs)

Also you'd want the SSDs to be much larger than what you need to backup. If they're small, then time machine will have to erase the older backups to make new backups, which just leads to more rewrites, stressing the SSD more. The ones I used were 4TB, but a clean first backup of my system was only like 250GB (because many things excluded). And then daily incremental backups are like 1-3GB.

re5i5tor 5 days ago||
I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS — just mentioned it in an article today as “works great, until it inevitably and catastrophically fails”.

Reliable for me is Kopia from Mac to S3 compatible volume (minio) on Synology.

H8crilA 5 days ago||
The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem in the first place?
ndegruchy 5 days ago||
I would try to do some restores of random files. Kind of a "canary in the coal mine" test. If you have problems with restoring some files or folders, then you'll have a problem with doing larger restores.
_rs 5 days ago|||
I agree - I am running my own Samba server and I don't think I'm affected, but it isn't really clear to me how to double check or why Apple's new default broke things in the first place
jcynix 5 days ago||
You could create a timestamp file on your Mac, where your Mac adds a timestamp per day or hour and have a script check that the timestamps appear in your backup.
rcarmo 5 days ago||
Hi! OP here. In my case Time Machine stopped doing backups to the server, period, and would keep silently refusing to do so. I encourage you to check backups are happening.
H8crilA 5 days ago||
Thanks - I can see why you skipped writing this, backups not happening at all is obviously a failure :). At least if you ever look there ...
greggh 5 days ago||
On Tahoe my Time Machine was broken after the update. My backup target is on a QNAP NAS. I just had to set it up from scratch again and it worked. But it did cost me a few files I was trying to recover. So I feel this.
PunchyHamster 5 days ago||
restic and kopia should work decently, if with a bit of setup, I think both can just mount backup as FUSE filesystem

The backup system that silently breaks when it doesn't like something in backend is not worth time

patte 5 days ago|
I did indeed switch to restic for everyday backup. Here I wrote about how to set it up so it has full disk access, uses TochID to access the secret and runs daily: https://github.com/patte/restic-macos-app
jvfjllkttg 5 days ago||
restic has the best documentation I’ve ever seen. And their developers are a joy to interact with.
dangus 5 days ago||
Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine.

Look, face it, Time Machine is not really what Apple wants you to do. They want you to buy cloud storage and just store your documents (desktop and documents in iCloud Drive) there. Photos are in the photos app. Etc.

Maybe they should make a Time Machine cloud service to help them justify putting time into it just like iOS has cloud backups, which work incredibly smoothly. But it’s also possible macOS has too much baggage for that to work (then again, migration assistant also seems to work great.

Long story short, if you want this you probably should be working with a third party, something like tossing $5 a month at backblaze backup.

I’ve moved away from Mac and I’ve been having a great user experience with Pika backup, although it’s not quite analogous to Time Machine. Still, my Linux distribution is immutable, so backing up my home directory is pretty much the whole thing.

chmaynard 5 days ago||
Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading to macOS Tahoe.
DwnVoteHoneyPot 5 days ago||
I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.

The last straw is that Finder's scroll bars are broken in Tahoe. I put up with it until I hit an emergency at work and was working as fast as I could (each minute mattered), Tahoe was slowing me down. Tahoe didn't pass the pressure test.

Marsymars 5 days ago||
> I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.

Yeah, this is most I’ve regretted updating macOS in a decade. Apple Music in Tahoe is no longer capable of playing LAN-shared music without bugging out, which is a real bummer for my normal workflow of listening to music all day while I work.

epistasis 5 days ago||
Avoid it as long as possible. Mail search is broken 4 out of 5 days that I attempt a search, and I need to go to the webmail versions of my accounts to find anything. Fortunately it's only something I need to do about once a day, unlike in prior lives, but holy crap they took the best ruing about macOS and kids destroyed jt completely.

Plasma on Linux is looking pretty tempting these days, especially with almost all office software being web based these days.

Switching email clients is a big lift that I need to investigate, and have been hesitant to jump into until absolutely necessary, but another week of this BS...

fmajid 5 days ago||
Geary or Thunderbird are excellent mail clients.
muro 5 days ago|
If you care about your data, don't trust a backup system that already failed before. This is simpler and easy to verify:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

You can also get any AI tool create a good backup script for your particular setup.

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