edit: I use Arq for daily backups, but T.M. for hourly. When T.M. eventually craters its storage, I have robust dailies in the cloud, so no worries.
The problem is them fucking up. Every other popular backup solution that does it does it just fine. And doesn't hide failures silently
I'm sure you could do the same with cron and rsync, but I can't be bothered.
[1] https://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.ht...
I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.
Edit: Yeah, the bootable backups have saved me more than once. It's great to just be able to keep working even when the system disk is kaput.
That's why I like it. Some of the visual flare is of course superfluous, but the timeline really is nice.
It's like git except it works without me having to think about it. (To be clear, git is much better, but I have to think about it.)
On the extremely rare occasion I have to replace my laptop, I literally just point it to the backup on the network with the cable plugged in, and an hour later it's "my laptop" again.
The backup system that silently breaks when it doesn't like something in backend is not worth time
Regardless he should've gotten alert if backup target is unusable, not silently break
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.
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."
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.
Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.
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.
An initial backup on newly formatted disk will run but very slowly. Perhaps reaching 100% but it never finishes. At some point the percentage will change and the backup will stay stuck at somewhere near 10%. Cancel backup and run it again. Gets to ~10% and stays stuck. Multiple drives. Re-fs'ed. Boot into safe mode. Networking off. Etc, etc. etc. The TimeMachineMechanic app doesn't have any revealing feedback. I can run a full tar backup to the same disks.
No idea.
I haven't tried backing up to a network share but really, it shouldn't be this difficult.
Clearly someone didn't test a bunch of edge cases when pushing this one out.
If you want to backup across the network then it’s probably best to choose some third party software.
Apple really needs to turn things around.
Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during restoration.
> Time Machine backup to NAS devices over Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is not recommended and won't be supported in a future version of macOS.
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.
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...
Sometimes, Time Machine just goes stupid and I have to wipe the drive and start over. All of my efforts in the past to copy or repair or do anything to a Time Machine drive has ended in folly, so when it starts acting up, I just wipe it and start anew.
Other times, it's the drive itself, and I swap it out.
99% of the time, it Just Works. Wiping the drive for me is more annoying than catastrophic (99.9999% of the time I don't care about my 18 month old data). It's mostly for local catastrophic fat fingering on my part, and to make sure I have a solid back up after I do a OS update. I have BackBlaze for "Why is there 5 feet mud in my burning house" scenarios.
Outside of that, I've always been able to recover from it.
My wife has a SSD drive she plugs into her laptop for TM backup. That machine at most makes laps around the house, so its not that big of a deal for her.
Supposedly, doing that eliminates a lot of the flakiness specific to SMB Time Machine, and while I haven't tested it personally, I have used disk images over SMB on macOS Tahoe recently, and they actually work great (other than the normal underlying annoyances of SMB that everyone with a NAS is mostly used to at this point).
The new ASIF format for disk images added in Tahoe actually works very well for this sort of thing, and gives you the benefits of sparse bundle disk images without requiring specific support for them on the underlying file system.[1][2] As long as you're on a file system that supports sparse files (I think pretty much every currently used file system except FAT32, exFAT, and very old implementations of HFS+), you get almost native performance out of the disk image now. (Although, again, that's just fixing the disk image overhead, you still have to work around the usual SMB weirdness unless you can get another remote file system protocol working.)
[1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/12/macos-tahoe-brings-a-new...
[2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/17/should-you-use-tahoes-ne...
Mount something over NFS< and you'll be relieved about how snappy things remain. Snappy relatively of course.
Yes, there's some bug in the backupd that panic.. no matter smb/nfs