A brief history of Time Machine (2024) (opens in new tab)

I've not had much of a problem with Time Machine. It works as advertised and does so quietly and without much input. The only thing I've had to do is turn off scheduled backups, as it tries to do a backup while I'm on a slow connection. This is because it can still see my NAS over Tailscale. I just put the menubar icon up there and trigger it when I get home.

I wonder if most folks have different expectations from it. Most of the HN crowd are probably already familiar with the usual suspects, so the lack of options and visibility into the process are probably concerns. For most folks, though, I imagine it's turn it on and forget it.

As a recent Linux to MacOS convert, I have been eyeing Time Machine as a simple backup solution. From reading the comments here it sounds like this is a far-fetched idealistic goal which is disappointing.

This seems to have not always been the case so where did things go wrong with Time Machine? Was there a particular MacOS release that broke everything?

Also what is really the gold standard in terms of backups? On Linux land I never had a great system. All I did was manually copy my drive every 6 months to a few external disks using clonezilla and gparted. This was tedious and not very user friendly.

Recently I learned of ZFS with its CoW approach and support for snapshots & it has piqued my interest. However while it may be a strictly superior way of doing backups its still not very user friendly. I have to budget time to learn it, set it up and of course its absolutely hopeless to expect my non-technical friends/family to figure it out.

Ultimately I'm seeking a tool that has good enough UI / UX that even my non-technical friends & family can use but supports incremental backups / snapshots along with detecting + auto correcting data corruption issues.

Does such a thing exist? Who are the big contenders in this space?

There is no other software I have used where the attractive design contrasts so starkly with the broken functionality.

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?

The only time I ever needed catastrophic backup recovery -- thanks to a robbery a dozen years ago -- Time Machine saved me. I bought a new Mac, plugged in the TM drive, told it to migrate, and stepped out for lunch. When I came back, even my browser windows were restored. I was pretty impressed.

I continue to keep a TM running on both my primary machine and my "media server" laptop. Because I'm an old nerd and I have those scars, though, TM is only one part of my backup regime. I also use a cloud provider, plus somewhat regular drive image backups stored in trusted friend's home, plus doing most of my work via a Dropbox account that's replicated across machines. But the front line remains Time Machine.

I used my TM backup last week to migrate into a new Mac. It worked, nearly as I can tell, with 99% fidelity. For SOME reason, some app data in ~/Library wasn't brought over. No idea why, but I suspect it's the weird container folders that are now the default app-data-storage location for most tools (vs., say, just letting the user create a folder in ~/Documents, which I'd prefer).

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

Whenever I've tried to use Time Machine over the network, to a NAS or even to another Mac, it craps out after a few months and says the backups are invalid and asks to start again from scratch.

Advice seems to be 'only use it with external drives' and then every time you plug the drive in it wants the password.

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.

Time Machine has been rock solid for ten years for my wife, who is an ordinary user.

I use SuperDuper which has also been solid for even longer.

i stopped counting how often Time Machine randomly stopped working on my wifes Macbook to our NAS. What a garbage software.

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.