Time Machine in Sequoia

Is this how it was in the "beleaguered" classic era?

@Manx No, everything felt less buggy back then. It’s just that when you did hit a crashing bug it could take down the whole system.

I think the throttle is getting more aggressive on newer release, this old trick “sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0” still works great for me.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/03/16/massively-speed-up-time-machine-backups/

One of the original advantages of Time Machine was that it was relatively simple and non-proprietary, especially compared to its contemporaries on Windows. Your backup was just an HFS+ partition, and you could browse the files easily with Finder or a terminal. Redundancy was done using hard links. At least at first everything seemed pretty rock solid, too. (Perhaps nostalgia goggles are blinding me, but I don't recall having any serious issues with it when it in the first several years it came out.)

Over the last decade, Apple seems to keep making it more and more complex and proprietary. Now it's using lots of whiz-bang-wow features of APFS to do... something, but nothing it wasn't already able to do, and those features make it very hard to work with, especially for third party tools. And unsurprisingly it falls on its face a lot more often. I noticed things got a bit better around macOS 12 or 13 -- at the very least I would no longer get that error message when backing up to a network drive telling me the whole thing needed to be blown away and started over for no good reason. But these sorts of reports in macOS 14 and 15 strongly disincline me to upgrade past macOS 13, which has already been far buggier and aggravating compared to 10.14. But at least all of the fundamental stuff I need like backups works in it.

Time Machine backup never worked properly for me over WiFi. No matter how fast it was and I would constantly get corrupted backup error and had to start again. I even changed from QNAP to Asustor and later to Synology - all the same issues.

The only fix I managed to get is disable hourly backups and just do daily - that way system didn’t create snapshots all the time trying to back it up.

Overall Time Machine needs to be rewritten and fixed properly.

Sequoia seems to have trouble with repeated file access requests: the excellent Arq backup app has also been fighting failures since the release of Sonoma and has published multiple updates to cover various edge cases, some of which seem to be related to the improper enforcement of permissions (spurious “Access Denied” errors in spite of Arq having Full Disk Access) and some to files being unaccountably “unavailable” in spite of being stored on the local boot drive. I wonder whether Time Machine might be bumping into these problems as well…

"Is this how it was in the "beleaguered" classic era?"

Software was much simpler then. Your whole hard drive was less than the size of just today's Photoshop. I think it's fair to say that there were a lot of less of these weird edge cases, and a lot less that could go wrong in general on your system (unless you installed a lot of system extensions). There was just a lot less of everything. For example, a lot less concurrency (apps froze when you opened a menu!).

But like Michael says, when something did go wrong, your whole system usually just froze or gave you the bomb dialog, forcing you to restart.

This did mean that you didn't run into these situations where errors kept compounding and things got wonkier and wonkier, because at some point, everything came to a halt, and you had to start fresh.

Time Machine has been in a weird position ever since Time Capsule was cancelled. External drives with laptops are a hassle and only nerds have local servers, be it Mac Mini or NAS, so there's no real story around the feature. It would make no sense to release it as a new feature in its current state.

I guess they feel like they can't just remove it, but it also doesn't make sense to invest in it, so it's in a limbo where it doesn't receive sufficient resources. I hope they have a plan for its future, but it doesn't much look like it, given how long it has been like this.

Time Machine is arguably one of the reasons I moved to macOS, when it first appeared in Leopard. Here, I thought, was finally a serious, grown-up operating system ...

And yet networked backups haven't really ever worked reliably since about macOS 10.14 Mojave. It's been local backups ever since, even for my server Mini, which is otherwise well-placed to do backups for my MBP, which now uses Arq because that works. On Linux, I still use rsnapshot sometimes, albeit nowadays it's worthwhile looking at combining that with LVM or a filesystem snapshot. Hopefully bcachefs will be finished soon so people have a reasonable choice besides ZFS.

I know Apple baked some tricks into Time Machine, but wouldn't rsync largely make this work without all the problems associated with Time Machine? When I was a more or less full time Mac user, I swapped to Carbon Copy Cloner versus Time Machine and was quite happy with the results, in particular the way CCC handled things for network backups. To be fair, this predated APFS and I believe CCC was largely just using rsync for backups over the network to another Mac.

Assuming one is backing up to an APFS drive (or an APFS disk image on a non APFS drive over the network???), only changed bits need to be backed up and not whole files, right??? Rsync definitely forces one to backup whole files which is why I would exempt VMs and such, but it seems like Macs should be even better at this whole backup thing, rather than worse all these years given the upgrades to the file system itself.

To be fair, I never thought Time Machine was reliable over the network and found it choked on locally attached drives too (how many Time Machine backups were corrupted over the years, Oy vey), whereas SuperDuper and CCC were far better. Any reason so many people haven't just switched to one of the many alternatives since Time Machine is so pathetic???

Wait, is it confirmed that Apple will silently delete all old backups if Time Machine thinks it detected a problem?!!?