Time Machine in Tahoe

This is just typical of Apple's low quality software these days. It can't even *warn* you it's not working. You just have to find out at the worst possible moment

I'm so disappointed about what Apple has become. This is a neverending stream of severe errors (that fail silently) and bugs. And the worst thing is, I don't believe Apple will ever fix the core issue that is bad management and priorities. They've become Microsoft in the 90s because they're so successful, they don't have to compete anymore

Apple wants me to stop whatever I doing to read its warning about my screenshotting app taking a screenshot of my screen, but when its shit breaks it apparently has something better to do.

This is why I wouldn’t even consider their creative bundle. I don’t trust their software to do even its one job anymore.

A backup you haven't verified is just a hope. This has been true since before Time Machine existed, since before the Mac existed. If you went two months without noticing your backups weren't running, that's on you.

Time Machine silently failing is a bug. Apple should surface errors. But the expectation that backup should be completely set-and-forget with zero user responsibility is the same "black box magic" mentality that people elsewhere are complaining Apple has foisted on us. You can't simultaneously demand power-user control and also expect to never check whether the system is actually working.

And if your only backup strategy is a single Time Machine volume on a NAS, you were already in trouble before any SMB bug. 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two different media types, one offsite. This isn't new. This isn't hard. If your data matters, you verify. If your data really matters, you have multiple independent backup paths so that when one fails silently, the others are still running.

Anyone who's been doing this long enough has lost data exactly once due to backup complacency, and then never again. The rest just haven't had their lesson yet.

Anyway, I'm sure this is all Liquid Glass's fault. Insert eye roll here.

Don't use TM for network backups. You're just asking for trouble. Use Arq (or similar), instead; proper userspace protocols, no filesystem deadlocks, plus encryption. You know it makes sense.

No DD, it’s actually not on us to babysit Apple’s software to make sure it works as advertised. That’s an unreasonable and illogical expectation

Two things can be true: don’t blindly trust your backups, and don’t blindly make excuses for a $3 trillion company that can’t ship software as reliably as it could when it was nearly dead 25 years ago.

"Anyway, I'm sure this is all Liquid Glass's fault. Insert eye roll here."

Apparently in your world, two wrongs do make a right.

Insert eye roll here.

The moment I don't check if my daily backups have run is the moment the backups stop being done. Really every time.

Also there should be multiple backups in case one fails. TimeMachine is for restoring the computer in case an update doesn't work.

so... in any OS newer than Ventura... can you assign Time Machine notifications for when a backup is completed?

You'd think that would be pretty important, right, like if there's a built-in notification for "tips", letting you know your backups have run seems like a pretty important thing to provide notifications for.

DD is 100% correct. Move on…. Get your stuff together.

As someone who runs Arq, Time Machine, and Backblaze, I want to sincerely tell DD and MM (who totally aren't the same person, I'm sure /s) to take a long walk off a short pier.

You know one of the key things that Arq and Backblaze do that Time Machine fails to? Scream bloody murder when things stop backing up as they should. Or an unexpected condition interrupted a backup. Or if something smells funny. Etc.

Asking Apple to make their backup software, that they market as being easy and **reliable**, to be better isn't insane or asking too much.

Save this as an AppleScript app:
on run
do shell script "tmutil startbackup"
end run
and schedule it to run hourly with Lingon or any scheduling tool.
I came up with the solution after I found that Time Machine "run automatically" wasn't working.

I just had to use Time Machine to restore my 2020 Intel iMac running Sonoma, because the Recovery OS bricked my installation *merely* for switching to the "Full Security" startup level (constant boot loop and the startup disk could no longer be verified when changing it in Recovery). I'd wanted to see if I could get ApplePay working on my iMac, and the boot policy is a requirement, but I deeply regret courting Apple's incompetence once again for such a small gain, especially since it doesn't support Touch ID so I'd have to enter my password to use it and it'd be easier to use my watch or iPhone.

Happily, I had a local TM backup, and really, these are the times when it's most useful. Unhappily, RecoveryOS wouldn't simply let me restore from the TM backup then and there; even though the backup was made on the same system, same OS, it demanded I reinstall and then use Migration Assistant. This of course meant that the resulting system wasn't a perfect restoration, and I had to spend some time fixing settings that had been mysteriously changed, as they are. Sigh. More of my time wasted, but it could have been much worse without Time Machine.

And, yes, this means that I chose not to simply cave in and upgrade to Tahoe, even though I had to create bootable installer media to stay on Sonoma. I had work to do and really couldn't waste more time. But I hate what Apple's quality control has become and, yes, I *do* think it amounts to contempt of users.

Time Machine has also saved my ass so many times over the years, but has also lost or corrupted its backups on me as well. It's definitely imperfect, especially with network backups (which are wonderfully transparent).

Fortunately, it's always announced its errors for me, even if that means me fixing a corrupted backup or being forced to start a new one (and losing some archives).

One of the things I wish Apple would do better at across all their devices is communicating errors. "It just works" (or fails silently) is super frustrating. Bring back error codes.

Anyway, because of that ever-present risk, I've now got multiple Time Machine backups going of multiple machines to multiple drives and locations and that's been working for me so far (cross fingers). And uh, the cloud is a backup, too, right? Fool me once, you can't fool me again.

I'm gonna be bummed when AirPort Time Capsule is no longer supported (next year) because it's the only way I can get my family to back up their machines (because it's transparent and automatic)