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My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for

My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be no support and the forums are not going to help. The broken backup is not going to be able to be repaired. Time Machine uses the "fuck you user" approach of not providing any information about what it does, or doesn't, or intends to do or whatever. If your data is worth backing up, don't use Time Machine. [0] https://bombich.com https://bombich.com

firecall 3y ago
My advice is to use TimeMachine plus other backups. I use: 1. TimeMachine on a 20TB TrueNAS ZFS setup 2. BackBlaze 3. ...not a versioned backup, but iCloud Synching, which is a useful disaster recovery.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Brajeshwar 3y ago
  I've found that the ideal size of Timemachine drive is just about twice of the target drive. It last for months if not years -- enough to go back. Beyond that, there must be an archival/backup system in place if you still want to get back files deleted years ago.
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    In my experience there's no need to worry about long term disk usage of Time Machine. The backup is going to get in a bad state and start failing to add new backups, requiring you to wipe it and start over before the drive fills up.
    - hoorible 3y ago
      My anecdata is the opposite of yours. My backup history is over 15 years old! I started backing up using Time Machine when I got my first Mac in 2006. Migrated my sparsebundle from my first Time Capsule to another when I needed a bigger one, then migrated that to a number of other drives drives over the years (which thankfully never failed, but I replaced them every 4 years). Have successfully restored from a backup onto at least ten different laptops (I was upgrading every year for a while). I have literally only ever had “one” Time Machine backup in the entire time that I have had a Mac. Honestly, I’m blown away it still works. I maintain other backups too, I’m not crazy to think that this is rock solid, but at this point I’m keeping it going just to see how long it will last.
      - firecall 3y ago
        That is very impressive! Up to a few years ago I was constantly hosing my TM drive and starting fresh. TM has supported multiple destinations for a good long while, so in the past I was always running two TM destinations. BTW, side note, with SSD prices crashing, I should be able to get rid of the spinning-rust and the luxury of silent local SSD TimeMachines running!
    - whartung 3y ago
      I’ve had this happen enough to just expect it “someday” and learned not to fight it. When Time Machine goes stupid, just wipe it and start over. Any efforts to try and recover or repair are just folly. Just watch your life tick away for days and days only to inevitably fail. It doesn’t happen often, but does happen every couple years. Many times it’s an indicator the drive is bad. That said, I’ve never had a problem recovering from TM. Whether it’s a single file, directory, or a complete reinstall. I have TM for my main drive, and use BackBlaze for everything (including my main and media drives).
    - Angostura 3y ago
      In my experience, I've been using TM ever since it was released, without these problems - and I've used it to transfer to new machines multiple times.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to have a replica of my drive. However, I still use Time Machine as a convenience to go back in time for my mistakes. My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files.
- 908B64B197 3y ago
  > My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files. Wait until she discovers git! As an aside, I wish there was an alternative like Time Machine on Windows.
  - guraf 3y ago
    There is, it's called File History and it's built in. I think it's been available since Vista. Like TM you need an external or network drive to use it. Unlike TM it's not very intuitive and Microsoft doesn't do much to advertise it.
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      I mean that's 'per drive' though. If you drive goes tits up so does your history of all files on that drive.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      Windows has one habit which I detest and I don't know why it acts this way: if you leave your drive disconnected for long enough, it will disable File History entirely and nag you about reconnecting and re-setting it up all over again. That recalcitrance is what discourages me from keeping it going at all. I just give up, it's not important enough to keep going through all that. If it were really important for Windows not to have the drive disconnected for too long, it would issue pre-emptive warnings before the timeout was reached, but it doesn't, it just shames you after the horse has left the barn.
smcleod 3y ago
CCC costs $77.50 AUD per major version just to use the app - it might be OK but that's a lot of money! TimeMachine is free and "good enough" for local / local network backups for most people, for remote backup BorgBase (although the "Vorta" borg GUI app is dreadful) and Backblaze are affordable-ish options. Also it doesn't look like CCC has write-only backups (immutable from the client side once created) like Borg has, there's no mention of encryption or deduplication in their feature list either - https://bombich.com/features https://bombich.com/features
- climb_stealth 3y ago
  Yes, it is pricey. But you get what you pay for. The attention to detail in the documentation and patch release notes from Bombich is on point. Zero regrets from my end about the money spent for it and it is one of the few software products where the price tag seems justified. FWIW I first bought a license in 05/2019. The only major version update since then has been in 07/2021. And the license for the upgrade cost $30.47 AUD. They don't seem to be exploiting version updates as a form of revenue generation. And yes, I'm sure there are backup solutions that work better in different scenarios. My main point is that Time Machine is rubbish for full system backups. CCC is polished, powerful, robust and power user friendly and one option that I have been super happy with.
- alwillis 3y ago
  > TimeMachine is free and "good enough" for local / local network backups for most people If you backup to an APFS-formatted network share, Time Machine is quite good and much more reliable than it was when backing up to HFS+ volumes. There was a lot of hackery going on to make HFS+ act like a modern file system emulating snapshots, which it didn't have. You could end up with millions of hard links; turns out that was kinda fragile… APFS supports snapshots and a bunch of other features that makes Time Machine faster and more reliable.
  - bwbmr 3y ago
    Is it possible to have a Linux server provide an APFS-formatted network share? Or does it require a Mac Mini + external drive in a closet?
js2 3y ago
Over the years, I've used both CCC and SuperDuper in order to have bootable backups. I've always used these in addition to TimeMachine though. I currently use TM to both my TrueNAS server and to a local disk (when I remember to plug it in). I use Arq to B2 for my home directory. For my family, I have them use Backblaze. It's the only thing I've found that's really set and forget. They never remember to plug in a local TM drive. And setting up TM with a network drive, it flakes out every few months, then they just ignore the messages from TM that their drive isn't being backed up. Backblaze pretty much Just Works. And it sends me an email report once a week. A full restore via Backblaze would be a bit painful. But it's better than no backup at all.
tverbeure 3y ago
In addition to Time Machine, I use iCloud for generic Mac apps, Backblaze for real disasters, and GitHub for all my personal projects. So my backup needs were already mostly covered without TM. Though the one time I needed a full SSD restore, Time Machine was the fastest way to do it, and it worked like a charm, after literally 8 years of not looking at it. But if I want to switch to CCC, you run their client app on your Mac, but how do you set up the server? Is it just a Linux NAS running Samba?
Shawnj2 3y ago
CCC is great although it’s not quite as useful as it is on Intel Macs on AS ones because the whole paradigm of “clone the drive onto a USB and boot it” doesn’t work.
- pazimzadeh 3y ago
  what about on apple silicon macs?
  - Shawnj2 3y ago
    You can’t boot off of non internal storage because Apple
    - robertoandred 3y ago
      Of course you can.
    - evilduck 3y ago
      You can, it's just less easy than in the pre-T2 Intel Mac days. https://eclecticlight.co/2021/06/02/booting-an-m1-mac-external-disks-and-local-boot-policy-in-macos-11-4/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/06/02/booting-an-m1-mac-extern...
      - Shawnj2 3y ago
        Ah, when I installed Asahi a while back I read that it wasn’t possible to install to an external drive and must have gotten it confused with not being able to install any OS to an external drive.
e40 3y ago
I had a weird issue with ccc and the dev and I couldn’t figure it out, so I switched to TM. I also use backblaze and local rsync’s.
crossroadsguy 3y ago
> Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be no support and the forums are not going to help. and > Time Machine uses the "fuck you user" approach apply to every piece of software or service out there by Apple. Every single one! iCloud? The only answer you’re ever going to get anywhere is - “No, your data is getting synced”. “Why don’t you enable and disable it”. Or “restart it”. My favourite is when Apple Support asks you to reinstall or reset the iOS or reinstall macOS entirely even if something as tiny as some sync problem occurs, with such confidence and matter of fact tone that you are forced to debate whether you are talking to some kafkasque and sadist bot. This is the Apple playbook. Naming and shaming them on social media doesn't work. Emails don’t get answered. Your customer request gets stonewalled. Sometimes you feel maybe it’s Apple paying you to use their products and not the other way round. An ex manager was thought to be crazy by us freshers when he would say that the moment he gets a Mac, for personal or work usage, the first thing he does is install Linux on that. We used to think he was some GNU/FOSS nut. He would smile and say - give it time, you’ll understand. And I understand now how helplessly hostile the Apple ecosystem is. You literally feel like a hostage — you can use it with such stonewalling and infuriating limits and you start feeling this is the only way! At this point I don’t think it’s anything other than self sabotage if anyone still says - but I use Time Machine (or any XYZ Apple thing that involves data integrity and reliability) - it works, or is “good enough” - or relies on something like iCloud for something like “data backup and integrity” in anyway. Can’t wait for the day when file access is easier on iOS (of course aft explicit permissions - which is the case even today actually) etc, or Android sucks less - in this glorious duopoly. I meant when they’re forced to open up their platform, because they’re not going to do it themselves!
- vGPU 3y ago
  Agreed. Have a 14 MBP. Nice hardware. MacOS makes me want to scream and tear my hair out.
  - hparadiz 3y ago
    Is the rubber around your screen starting to peel and degrade? I have a 2014 and the rubber just comes off if I rub it with a finger.
telcy 3y ago
> Time Machine works fine until it doesn’t I have been backing up to Time Machine for years without issues. Recently I started using pnpm (Nodejs package manager) and the backup process hangs on Mui material icons files (@mui/icons-material). Using "sudo fs_usage -f filesys backupd" I see that it is looping over the same files over and over.
- nabeards 3y ago
  I have found that Asimov alleviates this issue. https://github.com/stevegrunwell/asimov https://github.com/stevegrunwell/asimov I wrote a tiny blurb about it here: https://nabeards.com/time-machine-backups-ignoring-npm-modules/ https://nabeards.com/time-machine-backups-ignoring-npm-modul...
krackers 3y ago
Carbon Copy Cloner has a mode to periodically check backup integrity, and will alert you on mismatch. Given that unlike ZFS, APFS doesn't actually checksum user data, it's worth it for that feature alone. If you use ZFS for your backup destination, then this effectively ends up giving you verification of your non-ZFS source as well. And even if you don't backup to ZFS, then you still get notified that corruption was detected, allowing you to triage and take action. I think it's CCC5 or CCC6 that actually exposed the list of file mismatches to the user UI, but the diffs were greppable in the diagnostic logs all the way back to CCC3.
torstenvl 3y ago
Most Time Machine weirdness comes down to metadata mismatches after migrating from machine to machine. I made some fairly simple shell scripts to help fix these issues. https://github.com/torstenvl/tmutils https://github.com/torstenvl/tmutils They're pretty beta so if you use them please be careful. There are confirmations for major metadata changes, and the dirdedupe script runs in test mode by default (you have to use the --execute flag if you want it to actually do anything).
dddddaviddddd 3y ago
> Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. I experienced this a couple years ago when I somehow had a directory name with a UTF-8 byte order mark, causing mysterious Time Machine failures: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/timemachine-encoding-normalization https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/timemachine-encoding-no...
s3p 3y ago
Can I use CCC to backup to something like an AWS bucket of Backblaze B2 if I don't have a NAS in my house?
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  Generally I think the use case is "duplicate the boot volume of my machine onto an attached usb drive" though I think these days not all Macs will boot from an external drive? I have SuperDuper doing scheduled backups like this, along with Backblaze for offsite (but not so bootable) backups.
  - novok 3y ago
    Ever since a few major macos versions ago, I don't think that is possible anymore.
- climb_stealth 3y ago
  Maybe if the location can be mounted as a network drive. But I'd say it would be making it do something it is not intended to do. I'd say it is really meant for backing up to external storage or drives on the local network. There are probably better tools for this.
Eric_WVGG 3y ago
I also use CCC — in addition to Time Machine, running on a tiny little SD card sitting flush inside the laptop. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1687325-REG/transcend_ts512gjdl330_512gb_jtdrv_lte_330.html?ap=y&smp=ba_f1_ll&srsltid=AR57-fCb9z9pxeG_kq8r6qpaK3bTMz9xFLlt60c12zAPa0UswJLCrYQvR88 https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1687325-REG/transcend... CCC is great, but it doesn’t back up in near-real time and doesn’t do versioning. It wouldn’t have saved my butt while I was on the road last Friday like “built-in” Time Machine in my SD slot did.
- yurishimo 3y ago
  How reliable do you find it? I suppose if it's just for catastrophic emergencies, it will probably work through needing to use it. I'm guessing it will fail to write before it fails to read.
  - Eric_WVGG 3y ago
    Probably? But two or three years for a fifty dollar chip is nothing to sniff at.
- msephton 3y ago
  How does this work with mounting/unmounting, power cycling, etc.
  - Eric_WVGG 3y ago
    It doesn’t unmount unless you eject it. No issues with power cycling.
ChildOfChaos 3y ago
It's not really an issue though. You just restore the OS without the time machine backup and then you browse the time machine backup manually and copy the files you want. It's usually just a random file it can't read correctly in it's index so it breaks the whole thing, it's not like the whole backup is useless, you can manually browse all the files and you are still good, not sure how that is the 'fuck you user' approach.

firecall 3y ago

My advice is to use TimeMachine plus other backups. I use: 1. TimeMachine on a 20TB TrueNAS ZFS setup 2. BackBlaze 3. ...not a versioned backup, but iCloud Synching, which is a useful disaster recovery.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Brajeshwar 3y ago
I've found that the ideal size of Timemachine drive is just about twice of the target drive. It last for months if not years -- enough to go back. Beyond that, there must be an archival/backup system in place if you still want to get back files deleted years ago.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  In my experience there's no need to worry about long term disk usage of Time Machine. The backup is going to get in a bad state and start failing to add new backups, requiring you to wipe it and start over before the drive fills up.
  - hoorible 3y ago
    My anecdata is the opposite of yours. My backup history is over 15 years old! I started backing up using Time Machine when I got my first Mac in 2006. Migrated my sparsebundle from my first Time Capsule to another when I needed a bigger one, then migrated that to a number of other drives drives over the years (which thankfully never failed, but I replaced them every 4 years). Have successfully restored from a backup onto at least ten different laptops (I was upgrading every year for a while). I have literally only ever had “one” Time Machine backup in the entire time that I have had a Mac. Honestly, I’m blown away it still works. I maintain other backups too, I’m not crazy to think that this is rock solid, but at this point I’m keeping it going just to see how long it will last.
    - firecall 3y ago
      That is very impressive! Up to a few years ago I was constantly hosing my TM drive and starting fresh. TM has supported multiple destinations for a good long while, so in the past I was always running two TM destinations. BTW, side note, with SSD prices crashing, I should be able to get rid of the spinning-rust and the luxury of silent local SSD TimeMachines running!
  - whartung 3y ago
    I’ve had this happen enough to just expect it “someday” and learned not to fight it. When Time Machine goes stupid, just wipe it and start over. Any efforts to try and recover or repair are just folly. Just watch your life tick away for days and days only to inevitably fail. It doesn’t happen often, but does happen every couple years. Many times it’s an indicator the drive is bad. That said, I’ve never had a problem recovering from TM. Whether it’s a single file, directory, or a complete reinstall. I have TM for my main drive, and use BackBlaze for everything (including my main and media drives).
  - Angostura 3y ago
    In my experience, I've been using TM ever since it was released, without these problems - and I've used it to transfer to new machines multiple times.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to have a replica of my drive. However, I still use Time Machine as a convenience to go back in time for my mistakes. My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files.

908B64B197 3y ago
> My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files. Wait until she discovers git! As an aside, I wish there was an alternative like Time Machine on Windows.
- guraf 3y ago
  There is, it's called File History and it's built in. I think it's been available since Vista. Like TM you need an external or network drive to use it. Unlike TM it's not very intuitive and Microsoft doesn't do much to advertise it.
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    I mean that's 'per drive' though. If you drive goes tits up so does your history of all files on that drive.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Windows has one habit which I detest and I don't know why it acts this way: if you leave your drive disconnected for long enough, it will disable File History entirely and nag you about reconnecting and re-setting it up all over again. That recalcitrance is what discourages me from keeping it going at all. I just give up, it's not important enough to keep going through all that. If it were really important for Windows not to have the drive disconnected for too long, it would issue pre-emptive warnings before the timeout was reached, but it doesn't, it just shames you after the horse has left the barn.

smcleod 3y ago

CCC costs $77.50 AUD per major version just to use the app - it might be OK but that's a lot of money! TimeMachine is free and "good enough" for local / local network backups for most people, for remote backup BorgBase (although the "Vorta" borg GUI app is dreadful) and Backblaze are affordable-ish options. Also it doesn't look like CCC has write-only backups (immutable from the client side once created) like Borg has, there's no mention of encryption or deduplication in their feature list either - https://bombich.com/features https://bombich.com/features

climb_stealth 3y ago
Yes, it is pricey. But you get what you pay for. The attention to detail in the documentation and patch release notes from Bombich is on point. Zero regrets from my end about the money spent for it and it is one of the few software products where the price tag seems justified. FWIW I first bought a license in 05/2019. The only major version update since then has been in 07/2021. And the license for the upgrade cost $30.47 AUD. They don't seem to be exploiting version updates as a form of revenue generation. And yes, I'm sure there are backup solutions that work better in different scenarios. My main point is that Time Machine is rubbish for full system backups. CCC is polished, powerful, robust and power user friendly and one option that I have been super happy with.
alwillis 3y ago
> TimeMachine is free and "good enough" for local / local network backups for most people If you backup to an APFS-formatted network share, Time Machine is quite good and much more reliable than it was when backing up to HFS+ volumes. There was a lot of hackery going on to make HFS+ act like a modern file system emulating snapshots, which it didn't have. You could end up with millions of hard links; turns out that was kinda fragile… APFS supports snapshots and a bunch of other features that makes Time Machine faster and more reliable.
- bwbmr 3y ago
  Is it possible to have a Linux server provide an APFS-formatted network share? Or does it require a Mac Mini + external drive in a closet?

js2 3y ago

Over the years, I've used both CCC and SuperDuper in order to have bootable backups. I've always used these in addition to TimeMachine though. I currently use TM to both my TrueNAS server and to a local disk (when I remember to plug it in). I use Arq to B2 for my home directory. For my family, I have them use Backblaze. It's the only thing I've found that's really set and forget. They never remember to plug in a local TM drive. And setting up TM with a network drive, it flakes out every few months, then they just ignore the messages from TM that their drive isn't being backed up. Backblaze pretty much Just Works. And it sends me an email report once a week. A full restore via Backblaze would be a bit painful. But it's better than no backup at all.

tverbeure 3y ago

In addition to Time Machine, I use iCloud for generic Mac apps, Backblaze for real disasters, and GitHub for all my personal projects. So my backup needs were already mostly covered without TM. Though the one time I needed a full SSD restore, Time Machine was the fastest way to do it, and it worked like a charm, after literally 8 years of not looking at it. But if I want to switch to CCC, you run their client app on your Mac, but how do you set up the server? Is it just a Linux NAS running Samba?

Shawnj2 3y ago

CCC is great although it’s not quite as useful as it is on Intel Macs on AS ones because the whole paradigm of “clone the drive onto a USB and boot it” doesn’t work.

pazimzadeh 3y ago
what about on apple silicon macs?
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  You can’t boot off of non internal storage because Apple
  - robertoandred 3y ago
    Of course you can.
  - evilduck 3y ago
    You can, it's just less easy than in the pre-T2 Intel Mac days. https://eclecticlight.co/2021/06/02/booting-an-m1-mac-external-disks-and-local-boot-policy-in-macos-11-4/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/06/02/booting-an-m1-mac-extern...
    - Shawnj2 3y ago
      Ah, when I installed Asahi a while back I read that it wasn’t possible to install to an external drive and must have gotten it confused with not being able to install any OS to an external drive.

e40 3y ago

I had a weird issue with ccc and the dev and I couldn’t figure it out, so I switched to TM. I also use backblaze and local rsync’s.

crossroadsguy 3y ago

> Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be no support and the forums are not going to help. and > Time Machine uses the "fuck you user" approach apply to every piece of software or service out there by Apple. Every single one! iCloud? The only answer you’re ever going to get anywhere is - “No, your data is getting synced”. “Why don’t you enable and disable it”. Or “restart it”. My favourite is when Apple Support asks you to reinstall or reset the iOS or reinstall macOS entirely even if something as tiny as some sync problem occurs, with such confidence and matter of fact tone that you are forced to debate whether you are talking to some kafkasque and sadist bot. This is the Apple playbook. Naming and shaming them on social media doesn't work. Emails don’t get answered. Your customer request gets stonewalled. Sometimes you feel maybe it’s Apple paying you to use their products and not the other way round. An ex manager was thought to be crazy by us freshers when he would say that the moment he gets a Mac, for personal or work usage, the first thing he does is install Linux on that. We used to think he was some GNU/FOSS nut. He would smile and say - give it time, you’ll understand. And I understand now how helplessly hostile the Apple ecosystem is. You literally feel like a hostage — you can use it with such stonewalling and infuriating limits and you start feeling this is the only way! At this point I don’t think it’s anything other than self sabotage if anyone still says - but I use Time Machine (or any XYZ Apple thing that involves data integrity and reliability) - it works, or is “good enough” - or relies on something like iCloud for something like “data backup and integrity” in anyway. Can’t wait for the day when file access is easier on iOS (of course aft explicit permissions - which is the case even today actually) etc, or Android sucks less - in this glorious duopoly. I meant when they’re forced to open up their platform, because they’re not going to do it themselves!

vGPU 3y ago
Agreed. Have a 14 MBP. Nice hardware. MacOS makes me want to scream and tear my hair out.
- hparadiz 3y ago
  Is the rubber around your screen starting to peel and degrade? I have a 2014 and the rubber just comes off if I rub it with a finger.

telcy 3y ago

> Time Machine works fine until it doesn’t I have been backing up to Time Machine for years without issues. Recently I started using pnpm (Nodejs package manager) and the backup process hangs on Mui material icons files (@mui/icons-material). Using "sudo fs_usage -f filesys backupd" I see that it is looping over the same files over and over.

nabeards 3y ago
I have found that Asimov alleviates this issue. https://github.com/stevegrunwell/asimov https://github.com/stevegrunwell/asimov I wrote a tiny blurb about it here: https://nabeards.com/time-machine-backups-ignoring-npm-modules/ https://nabeards.com/time-machine-backups-ignoring-npm-modul...

krackers 3y ago

Carbon Copy Cloner has a mode to periodically check backup integrity, and will alert you on mismatch. Given that unlike ZFS, APFS doesn't actually checksum user data, it's worth it for that feature alone. If you use ZFS for your backup destination, then this effectively ends up giving you verification of your non-ZFS source as well. And even if you don't backup to ZFS, then you still get notified that corruption was detected, allowing you to triage and take action. I think it's CCC5 or CCC6 that actually exposed the list of file mismatches to the user UI, but the diffs were greppable in the diagnostic logs all the way back to CCC3.

torstenvl 3y ago

Most Time Machine weirdness comes down to metadata mismatches after migrating from machine to machine. I made some fairly simple shell scripts to help fix these issues. https://github.com/torstenvl/tmutils https://github.com/torstenvl/tmutils They're pretty beta so if you use them please be careful. There are confirmations for major metadata changes, and the dirdedupe script runs in test mode by default (you have to use the --execute flag if you want it to actually do anything).

dddddaviddddd 3y ago

> Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. I experienced this a couple years ago when I somehow had a directory name with a UTF-8 byte order mark, causing mysterious Time Machine failures: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/timemachine-encoding-normalization https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/timemachine-encoding-no...

s3p 3y ago

Can I use CCC to backup to something like an AWS bucket of Backblaze B2 if I don't have a NAS in my house?

blacksmith_tb 3y ago
Generally I think the use case is "duplicate the boot volume of my machine onto an attached usb drive" though I think these days not all Macs will boot from an external drive? I have SuperDuper doing scheduled backups like this, along with Backblaze for offsite (but not so bootable) backups.
- novok 3y ago
  Ever since a few major macos versions ago, I don't think that is possible anymore.
climb_stealth 3y ago
Maybe if the location can be mounted as a network drive. But I'd say it would be making it do something it is not intended to do. I'd say it is really meant for backing up to external storage or drives on the local network. There are probably better tools for this.

Eric_WVGG 3y ago

I also use CCC — in addition to Time Machine, running on a tiny little SD card sitting flush inside the laptop. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1687325-REG/transcend_ts512gjdl330_512gb_jtdrv_lte_330.html?ap=y&smp=ba_f1_ll&srsltid=AR57-fCb9z9pxeG_kq8r6qpaK3bTMz9xFLlt60c12zAPa0UswJLCrYQvR88 https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1687325-REG/transcend... CCC is great, but it doesn’t back up in near-real time and doesn’t do versioning. It wouldn’t have saved my butt while I was on the road last Friday like “built-in” Time Machine in my SD slot did.

yurishimo 3y ago
How reliable do you find it? I suppose if it's just for catastrophic emergencies, it will probably work through needing to use it. I'm guessing it will fail to write before it fails to read.
- Eric_WVGG 3y ago
  Probably? But two or three years for a fifty dollar chip is nothing to sniff at.
msephton 3y ago
How does this work with mounting/unmounting, power cycling, etc.
- Eric_WVGG 3y ago
  It doesn’t unmount unless you eject it. No issues with power cycling.

ChildOfChaos 3y ago

It's not really an issue though. You just restore the OS without the time machine backup and then you browse the time machine backup manually and copy the files you want. It's usually just a random file it can't read correctly in it's index so it breaks the whole thing, it's not like the whole backup is useless, you can manually browse all the files and you are still good, not sure how that is the 'fuck you user' approach.