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There’s a few headlines talking about backups - does apple finally have a cloud based time machine replacement? I’d be so excited to see that as a general consu

There’s a few headlines talking about backups - does apple finally have a cloud based time machine replacement? I’d be so excited to see that as a general consumer too.

chrisseaton 5y ago
I think that's unlikely to be a thing they're working on. You can get that from storing your files in iCloud already, and these days is there any good reason to back up the rest of your system? If I had to rebuild a system due to hardware failure the absolute last thing I'd want to do would be restore all the accumulated system cruft!
- sigjuice 5y ago
  It depends on one's preferences and circumstances. I got a new M1 MacBook recently and I took my time setting it up from scratch. A few years ago, I had my MacBook stolen. I was up and running within a few hours after getting a new Mac and restoring from my Time Capsule. Dealing with the aftermath of a car break-in (thanks San Francisco!) and a new computer at the same time was going to be a bit much for me.
- dewey 5y ago
  Storing files in iCloud Drive is very different from a backup I would argue. What a business would want in this case is Backblaze like functionality with versioning / restore. iCloud drive also doesn't really help you with restoring a full system like it is possible on iOS where all your settings, passwords and apps are just like you left them.
  - lostgame 5y ago
    To be fair, iCloud has a password manager on MacOS / iOS that works great.
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    Pages/Numbers/Keynote do support versioning in-app when the doc is stored in iCloud Drive, albeit not as efficient as true versioning.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Doesn't iCloud Drive have a revision history? For example DropBox does, so Apple could add the feature. > all your settings, passwords and apps are just like you left them Now that most of these things come from the cloud anyway, do we need the rest of the system backed up? I don't need to restore my system from a backup - I just log back into Creative Cloud, Jet Brains, etc.
    - dewey 5y ago
      It probably very much depends on what you are using your computer for. If you are just living in Chrome and use Google Docs and Mail there this will work just fine. If you are someone who has tools set up, apps not from the app store, come custom dot files, your shell history and environment variables this will not help you at all and getting up and running after a device got lost / destroyed will take you a day. Even if it's just simple things like your system theme / Dock positions of your apps. You could probably fiddle and symlink things and hope everything works but it's not a "log in and have your device be in the same condition as before" like you'd get from an iOS "Restore from iCloud" functionality.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    > What a business would want in this case is Backblaze like functionality with versioning / restore Maybe. Some businesses just back up just their user's files and just reimage machines when something goes wrong.
    - jhickok 5y ago
      Honestly as an end-user that's my preference.
  - selykg 5y ago
    I use Backblaze, and aside from the cost, it's great. It's fine for 1 computer, but oof, there's no multi-computer discount. Most of my machines aren't backing up terabytes of storage either. We're talking like ~100gb a machine and there's two of them. Businesses like to talk up "unlimited" but it's a pain when you're using less storage but have to subsidize those using a ton of storage.
    - majou 5y ago
      A few years ago Backblaze started offering B2, a storage API priced at $0.005/GB/month, and dirt cheap egress fees unlike the big cloud offerings. You'd save money switching to a client that supports B2, they have a list on the site, though I'm not sure which provide decent version management.
- Timothee 5y ago
  > these days is there any good reason to back up the rest of your system From experience, there is definite need. I spilled some water on my work laptop and it died. I was able to get a replacement in maybe 3 hours, but setting everything up again was a major pain. A Time Machine backup would have let me continue more or less where I left off in a matter of an hour or two, vs. many hours/days (and some lost work). (not that Time Machine is perfect either, but much better than just iCloud) I agree that getting rid of system cruft can be good, but it's better handled proactively than on machine failure IMO.
- skoskie 5y ago
  That really depends on the user. As a developer, I’ve modified quite a few system files and would like those things backed up. It’s one reason I don’t use Backblaze – they refuse to backup system files. As an employer, I can imagine a situation in which those “cruft” files contain information about the actions of an employee that might be valuable in legal proceedings, or just providing they were terminated for cause. But 98% of the time you’re totally right about not needing to backup every little config file.
  - Leherenn 5y ago
    I used to have a repo with scripts that "encodes" those change. Stuff like "setup-zsh.sh" and so on. On a new computer, I could just install git, clone the repo then run the scripts. I stopped doing that because I don't use new systems often enough to be worth it, and as someone else said it's also a good time to examine and improve your workflow.
  - xoa 5y ago
    >As a developer, I’ve modified quite a few system files I do as well. Given that such things tend to be more fragile between OS releases though and easy to forget I usually prefer to recreate them for upgrades or reinstalls anyway. Also provides an opportunity to reevaluate them. So these days I think the better way to go about it is with automation as much as possible rather than backups. That said: >It’s one reason I don’t use Backblaze – they refuse to backup system files. Well, you can use something like CCC to image your startup disk to a file somewhere else, and regular BB will cheerfully take care of that. Makes restores mildly more work but not much given that a failure which nukes the system files means having to do some level of reinstall/recover anyway. I use Backblaze B2 though, which has maintained decent pricing vs S3 and is much more natively flexible. Having local systems backup to TrueNAS (or have data folders that just live there) then that go to B2 is another way to handle things. With Apple making custom restores ever more difficult though all that might need some reevaluation too :(. I miss how powerful and pleasant their tools were at one point with no subscriptions or WAN required, and will always be a bit bummed things didn't go the way of adding your own signing to the system image utility, Net Boot/Net Install etc they already had going. Macs were really great to run heavily off a LAN back around 10.5.
- derefr 5y ago
  iOS devices do full backups to iCloud†, restorable onto a new device just like macOS full Time Machine backups are. So why not macOS backups in iCloud? If anything, you'd expect it to be the other way around—in iOS devices, you/apps can't litter your homedir with random garbage, while in macOS you can. So it's more useful to back up macOS. † You can also make an iOS backup onto a local macOS computer running iTunes, which is, I believe, what they do for you when transferring your data to a new device in store. I haven't looked at them lately, but if they're just plain-old Time Machine backups, that's even more damning, as that would imply that iCloud is already perfectly set up for receiving Time Machine backups.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > iOS devices do full backups to iCloud Right but that functionality dates back quite a few years now, back from iTunes and before cloud computing. I'm not sure they'd build that functionality today. Exactly as you say - what is the point of a full phone backup when you don't normally store any files on your phone? They could back up the metadata of what apps you have installed and where you've put them on your home screen. I'm not sure it's worth doing much else?
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      It’s worth it for the device migration functionality alone. If I switch/upgrade iOS devices, I can perform iCloud or device-to-device recovery, which is much more useful to me than simply restoring which apps I had installed and their data.
  - dwaite 5y ago
    > So why not macOS backups in iCloud? If anything, you'd expect it to be the other way around—in iOS devices, you/apps can't litter your homedir with random garbage, while in macOS you can. So it's more useful to back up macOS. This is somewhat the reason why no full macOS backup to the cloud. iOS naturally normalizes the content due to its use of iTunes Store content (apps, movies, television shows, books, music). On macOS, you can't necessarily just ignore apps and say you'll download from the store - not only can you move applications around, you can delete parts of them and _many_ devices have apps which were not downloaded from the store. So a 1TB Mac backup will take 1TB of iCloud Data and require 1TB of data to be uploaded/downloaded to their storage account. This also affects the speed of restores on higher-speed connections - a lot of the iTunes content winds up being cached by CDNs. Apple's solution so far has been to back up just the user's Documents and Desktop folders to iCloud, since these are the two most important "general purpose" locations on the Mac.
- binaryblitz 5y ago
  I agree and disagree. For my gaming desktop, I'd just reinstall apps to get a fresh start. I started my own software consulting/contracting thing this summer and if my machine crashed, every hour I'm not working is costing me money. So setting up all my apps again to get a fresh start isn't worth it. With TimeMachine on my NAS, I just get the replacement computer and let it restore while I sleep. Then I'm good to go the next morning.
rsync 5y ago
"There’s a few headlines talking about backups - does apple finally have a cloud based time machine replacement?" Apple doesn't, but we do. You simply do a "dumb" 1:1 mirror to an rsync.net account with 'rsync', which you already have. Then you set up an arbitrary snapshot schedule in your account. rsync.net will then create, and rotate, immutable snapshots of your dataset. [1] The only difference is that our ZFS snapshots are bit-wise efficient whereas the time machine snapshots are still (I think) file-wise efficient ... which is to say they are less efficient. We used to advertise this ... the notion that you could clone your time machine config to rsync.net ... but we came to the conclusion that there's a pretty insular hackers-on-osx bubble and, in reality, 99% of mac users don't drop to the command line for any reason. Which is too bad ... [1] https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1453044746213990405 https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1453044746213990405
- beermonster 5y ago
  Would you say that this is the most time machine-esque way of using your service? I’d imagine using borg (pulled from macports/homebrew) and using MacFUSE to local mount would seem pretty time machine like whilst offering other benefits over rsync such as client side encryption, compression and deduplication (the dedupe might be irrelevant since you’re using zfs)
  - rsync 5y ago
    Yes, I would say that. It's also the simplest method - again, just a dumb rsync command that you re-run every day. If you are using borg you would probably handle the retention and versioning yourself with the borg tool and perhaps set just one or two daily snapshots at rsync.net. These would not be for your backup schema, but rather, for safety in case of mistakes/ransomware/mallory.

There’s a few headlines talking about backups - does apple finally have a cloud based time machine replacement? I’d be so excited to see that as a general consumer too.

chrisseaton 5y ago

I think that's unlikely to be a thing they're working on. You can get that from storing your files in iCloud already, and these days is there any good reason to back up the rest of your system? If I had to rebuild a system due to hardware failure the absolute last thing I'd want to do would be restore all the accumulated system cruft!

sigjuice 5y ago
It depends on one's preferences and circumstances. I got a new M1 MacBook recently and I took my time setting it up from scratch. A few years ago, I had my MacBook stolen. I was up and running within a few hours after getting a new Mac and restoring from my Time Capsule. Dealing with the aftermath of a car break-in (thanks San Francisco!) and a new computer at the same time was going to be a bit much for me.
dewey 5y ago
Storing files in iCloud Drive is very different from a backup I would argue. What a business would want in this case is Backblaze like functionality with versioning / restore. iCloud drive also doesn't really help you with restoring a full system like it is possible on iOS where all your settings, passwords and apps are just like you left them.
- lostgame 5y ago
  To be fair, iCloud has a password manager on MacOS / iOS that works great.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  Pages/Numbers/Keynote do support versioning in-app when the doc is stored in iCloud Drive, albeit not as efficient as true versioning.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Doesn't iCloud Drive have a revision history? For example DropBox does, so Apple could add the feature. > all your settings, passwords and apps are just like you left them Now that most of these things come from the cloud anyway, do we need the rest of the system backed up? I don't need to restore my system from a backup - I just log back into Creative Cloud, Jet Brains, etc.
  - dewey 5y ago
    It probably very much depends on what you are using your computer for. If you are just living in Chrome and use Google Docs and Mail there this will work just fine. If you are someone who has tools set up, apps not from the app store, come custom dot files, your shell history and environment variables this will not help you at all and getting up and running after a device got lost / destroyed will take you a day. Even if it's just simple things like your system theme / Dock positions of your apps. You could probably fiddle and symlink things and hope everything works but it's not a "log in and have your device be in the same condition as before" like you'd get from an iOS "Restore from iCloud" functionality.
- kube-system 5y ago
  > What a business would want in this case is Backblaze like functionality with versioning / restore Maybe. Some businesses just back up just their user's files and just reimage machines when something goes wrong.
  - jhickok 5y ago
    Honestly as an end-user that's my preference.
- selykg 5y ago
  I use Backblaze, and aside from the cost, it's great. It's fine for 1 computer, but oof, there's no multi-computer discount. Most of my machines aren't backing up terabytes of storage either. We're talking like ~100gb a machine and there's two of them. Businesses like to talk up "unlimited" but it's a pain when you're using less storage but have to subsidize those using a ton of storage.
  - majou 5y ago
    A few years ago Backblaze started offering B2, a storage API priced at $0.005/GB/month, and dirt cheap egress fees unlike the big cloud offerings. You'd save money switching to a client that supports B2, they have a list on the site, though I'm not sure which provide decent version management.
Timothee 5y ago
> these days is there any good reason to back up the rest of your system From experience, there is definite need. I spilled some water on my work laptop and it died. I was able to get a replacement in maybe 3 hours, but setting everything up again was a major pain. A Time Machine backup would have let me continue more or less where I left off in a matter of an hour or two, vs. many hours/days (and some lost work). (not that Time Machine is perfect either, but much better than just iCloud) I agree that getting rid of system cruft can be good, but it's better handled proactively than on machine failure IMO.
skoskie 5y ago
That really depends on the user. As a developer, I’ve modified quite a few system files and would like those things backed up. It’s one reason I don’t use Backblaze – they refuse to backup system files. As an employer, I can imagine a situation in which those “cruft” files contain information about the actions of an employee that might be valuable in legal proceedings, or just providing they were terminated for cause. But 98% of the time you’re totally right about not needing to backup every little config file.
- Leherenn 5y ago
  I used to have a repo with scripts that "encodes" those change. Stuff like "setup-zsh.sh" and so on. On a new computer, I could just install git, clone the repo then run the scripts. I stopped doing that because I don't use new systems often enough to be worth it, and as someone else said it's also a good time to examine and improve your workflow.
- xoa 5y ago
  >As a developer, I’ve modified quite a few system files I do as well. Given that such things tend to be more fragile between OS releases though and easy to forget I usually prefer to recreate them for upgrades or reinstalls anyway. Also provides an opportunity to reevaluate them. So these days I think the better way to go about it is with automation as much as possible rather than backups. That said: >It’s one reason I don’t use Backblaze – they refuse to backup system files. Well, you can use something like CCC to image your startup disk to a file somewhere else, and regular BB will cheerfully take care of that. Makes restores mildly more work but not much given that a failure which nukes the system files means having to do some level of reinstall/recover anyway. I use Backblaze B2 though, which has maintained decent pricing vs S3 and is much more natively flexible. Having local systems backup to TrueNAS (or have data folders that just live there) then that go to B2 is another way to handle things. With Apple making custom restores ever more difficult though all that might need some reevaluation too :(. I miss how powerful and pleasant their tools were at one point with no subscriptions or WAN required, and will always be a bit bummed things didn't go the way of adding your own signing to the system image utility, Net Boot/Net Install etc they already had going. Macs were really great to run heavily off a LAN back around 10.5.
derefr 5y ago
iOS devices do full backups to iCloud†, restorable onto a new device just like macOS full Time Machine backups are. So why not macOS backups in iCloud? If anything, you'd expect it to be the other way around—in iOS devices, you/apps can't litter your homedir with random garbage, while in macOS you can. So it's more useful to back up macOS. † You can also make an iOS backup onto a local macOS computer running iTunes, which is, I believe, what they do for you when transferring your data to a new device in store. I haven't looked at them lately, but if they're just plain-old Time Machine backups, that's even more damning, as that would imply that iCloud is already perfectly set up for receiving Time Machine backups.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > iOS devices do full backups to iCloud Right but that functionality dates back quite a few years now, back from iTunes and before cloud computing. I'm not sure they'd build that functionality today. Exactly as you say - what is the point of a full phone backup when you don't normally store any files on your phone? They could back up the metadata of what apps you have installed and where you've put them on your home screen. I'm not sure it's worth doing much else?
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    It’s worth it for the device migration functionality alone. If I switch/upgrade iOS devices, I can perform iCloud or device-to-device recovery, which is much more useful to me than simply restoring which apps I had installed and their data.
- dwaite 5y ago
  > So why not macOS backups in iCloud? If anything, you'd expect it to be the other way around—in iOS devices, you/apps can't litter your homedir with random garbage, while in macOS you can. So it's more useful to back up macOS. This is somewhat the reason why no full macOS backup to the cloud. iOS naturally normalizes the content due to its use of iTunes Store content (apps, movies, television shows, books, music). On macOS, you can't necessarily just ignore apps and say you'll download from the store - not only can you move applications around, you can delete parts of them and _many_ devices have apps which were not downloaded from the store. So a 1TB Mac backup will take 1TB of iCloud Data and require 1TB of data to be uploaded/downloaded to their storage account. This also affects the speed of restores on higher-speed connections - a lot of the iTunes content winds up being cached by CDNs. Apple's solution so far has been to back up just the user's Documents and Desktop folders to iCloud, since these are the two most important "general purpose" locations on the Mac.
binaryblitz 5y ago
I agree and disagree. For my gaming desktop, I'd just reinstall apps to get a fresh start. I started my own software consulting/contracting thing this summer and if my machine crashed, every hour I'm not working is costing me money. So setting up all my apps again to get a fresh start isn't worth it. With TimeMachine on my NAS, I just get the replacement computer and let it restore while I sleep. Then I'm good to go the next morning.

rsync 5y ago

"There’s a few headlines talking about backups - does apple finally have a cloud based time machine replacement?" Apple doesn't, but we do. You simply do a "dumb" 1:1 mirror to an rsync.net account with 'rsync', which you already have. Then you set up an arbitrary snapshot schedule in your account. rsync.net will then create, and rotate, immutable snapshots of your dataset. [1] The only difference is that our ZFS snapshots are bit-wise efficient whereas the time machine snapshots are still (I think) file-wise efficient ... which is to say they are less efficient. We used to advertise this ... the notion that you could clone your time machine config to rsync.net ... but we came to the conclusion that there's a pretty insular hackers-on-osx bubble and, in reality, 99% of mac users don't drop to the command line for any reason. Which is too bad ... [1] https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1453044746213990405 https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1453044746213990405

beermonster 5y ago
Would you say that this is the most time machine-esque way of using your service? I’d imagine using borg (pulled from macports/homebrew) and using MacFUSE to local mount would seem pretty time machine like whilst offering other benefits over rsync such as client side encryption, compression and deduplication (the dedupe might be irrelevant since you’re using zfs)
- rsync 5y ago
  Yes, I would say that. It's also the simplest method - again, just a dumb rsync command that you re-run every day. If you are using borg you would probably handle the retention and versioning yourself with the borg tool and perhaps set just one or two daily snapshots at rsync.net. These would not be for your backup schema, but rather, for safety in case of mistakes/ransomware/mallory.