Time Machine in Tahoe
Time Machine had happily gone that long without backing up or warning me that it had no backup storage. […] I think this results from Time Machine’s set and forget trait, and its widespread use by laptop Macs that are often disconnected from their backup storage.
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If you do just set it and forget it, you will come to regret it.
Today, after a minor disaster with my Obsidian vault, I decided to restore from Time Machine, and… I realized that it had silently broken across both my Tahoe machines.
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It just stopped doing backups, silently. No error messages, no notifications, nothing. Just no backups for around two months.
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After some research, I found out that the issue is with Apple’s unilateral decision to change their SMB defaults (without apparently notifying anyone), and came across a few possible fixes.
Previously:
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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.
