A brief history of Time Machine (2024)(eclecticlight.co)
20 pointsby firloop7 days ago5 comments
  • hmng13 minutes ago
    Version 1 of Time Machine was great, you could travel to the past and see how your documents looked like! Too bad that they never released version 2. Would have been great to be able to travel into the future and see how your documents would look like.
  • doener3 hours ago
    There is no other software I have used where the attractive design contrasts so starkly with the broken functionality.
  • lukestevens2 hours ago
    I've used Time Machine for years with a cheap HD hanging off an old Airport Extreme, until today, incidentally.

    MacOS had started warning that this approach won't be supported in the future. After upgrading to Tahoe, Time Machine kept saying backup failed, no matter what I did, despite the fact it should still work. Oh well, I'll just delete the old backup and create a new one.

    I delete the old backup, click "Add Backup Disk...", select the backup disk, and get blocked with "[Drive] can only be used if it contains existing Time Machine backups for this Mac." It did! You broke them!

    UGH.

    I thought I'd get another year out of it. Apple in their wisdom has decided otherwise. Now I have no historical or ongoing backups.

    Any recs on what to use instead?

    • setoptan hour ago
      Arq Backup works great on Mac. It has a lot of smart features like only backing up on certain networks, only backing up when external power is connected, etc. You can backup either locally or remote (encrypted then uploaded to your preferred cloud provider, I used BackBlaze B2).

      If you prefer free and open source, you can try Vorta (based on Borg Backup which I can also vouch for).

    • an hour ago
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    • dsegoan hour ago
      Carbon Copy Cloner.
    • an hour ago
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  • 8fingerlouie3 hours ago
    And yet, despite all it's bells and whistles, it hasn't kept up with the times.

    Apple introduced "icloud optimized storage" about a decade ago, and Time Machine still doesn't support backing up files that have been offloaded to iCloud.

    While you can trigger a file download of files from iCloud, the design of Photos, where it replaces originals with "space optimized versions" means only Apple Photos can download original photos, and Time Machine will just backup a bunch of useless preview files.

    i REALLY wish Apple would implement a way in MacOS to download and backup ALL iCloud content, especially given that Apples own recommendations are a bunch of manual steps : https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306

  • asplake4 hours ago
    I wonder if they have considered Time Machine as a kind of private Dropbox, such that some directories are shares between machines, perhaps even remotely. I haven’t owned a Time Machine for at least a decade, but I might be tempted back by something like that.
    • setoptan hour ago
      I don’t think it’s the right tool for that. Sync and Backup require different architectures to function optimally.
    • adastra222 hours ago
      Isn’t that what iCloud files is?