[citruspi]

> I've been generally happy with Time Machine's stability, but this is getting me a little worried.

For the longest time, I backed up my MacBooks with Time Machine to a NAS.

Seemed to work fine - Time Machine was successful and I was able to browse previous versions on the machine being backed up without an issue (browse history of machine A on machine A).

Then one day I was planning to wipe a MacBook and do a clean install - figured I'd confirm I could browse my backups made on machine A on machine B before I wiped A. I spent over an hour attempting to open the sparse bundle (w/ Time Machine and manually) and just couldn't do it - kept loading forever or giving me errors about volume verification among other things[0].

> I guess now's a good time to looking into Arq (or similar)

Like you, I decided to take a look at alternatives. I'd previously played around with Arq (v5) and it looked awesome - stable, well-documented, etc. Well, by the time I actually needed an alternative to Time Machine, Arq had released v6 - earlier this year[1].

Unfortunately it appeared to be bug-prone (not great for backups!) and lacked ANY documentation (one of the great things about v5 was the in-depth documentation, particularly around backup format). Users on the subreddit[2] weren't thrilled and you can't purchase v5 licenses (and TBH I wouldn't recommend purchasing software that isn't supported anymore).

Within the last week or two, Arq has released a second major version within a year - v7[3]. Feedback appears to be better, and the author has acknowledged mistakes, but TBH I'm wary. Definitely not adopting two-week old software as my primary method for backing up.

I've been playing around with Carbon Copy Cloner[4] more recently.

The ideal goal would be bootable backups to a disk image hosted remotely but that doesn't appear to be possible[5] - so I'm resigning myself to file-based instead - no bootable disk image, but at least I'm a little more confident in my backups? And a single "file" (or image) becoming corrupt doesn't blow away the rest of my backup ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas, I'm all ears.

Edit: Probably worth noting that in this case machine A was running 10.14 (and HFS) and machine B 10.15 (and APFS) - but I'd imagine 10.15 should be able to open a 10.14 HFS sparse bundle without an issue.

[0] https://pastebin.com/Le6Q407e

[1] https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/arq-6-more-power-more-securit...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Arqbackup/

[3] https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/next-up-arq-7/

[4] https://bombich.com/

[5] https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/i-want-back-up-my-whole-mac-time...

[wpm]

I use CCC in addition to work-provided Code42 and can't recommend it enough. I have a 1TB SSD hanging off the back of my Mac that holds a full bootable copy of my boot volume as it stands, everyday at 4PM.

Because I have Code42 for versioning and going back further in time (though WFH due to COVID has truly brought to bear the shitty upload speed my home connection has), I don't utilize the SafetyNet feature,so I can't speak to the efficacy of it, but for straight daily dumb snapshots I love CCC. When I went 100% remote back in March I opted to get a specced up Mac mini instead of a Macbook Pro. CCC made moving everything over barely a speedbump. It'll alert you to any issues and walk you through the restore when it senses it's being run off a booted external volume group. It really only took a couple of clicks. Dead simple. It also provides a handy GUI for APFS snapshots.

I don't buy a lot of...serious software (either work buys it for me or it's a PC game), but I don't regret the $40 CCC set me back. Plus, the devs are pretty much always ready for the new OS in fall, which to me is an important feature separating an OK Mac app from a good one.

[barkingcat]

for $40 CCC is beautifully cheap software for the peace of mind.

I've been using it for many years and every single time it's worked brilliantly.

[perardi]

(though WFH due to COVID has truly brought to bear the shitty upload speed my home connection has)

What’s the old saw about “the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes”? Yeah, that. It would be faster (if obviously not economical) to just mail a hard drive back to the home office every week than trying to back up my entire machine over residential cable internet.

[pfranz]

Personally, I have a network Time Machine backup and use Backblaze. I also keep a USB drive handy and clone a bootable backup via SuperDuper periodically--especially before large changes like an OS update. I've had to dig into the nitty gritty of Time Machine every year or so (usually stuff I do, but in any case failed backups are concerning).

Relevant to you, earlier this year (using Catalina) I swapped computers. My usual process is to create a disk image (usually with Disk Utility or SuperDuper) of my old computer and these overlay systems are tripping me up.

I remember my first attempt only looked to clone the OS / root system--not my user data files. I can't remember exactly what I did next, maybe clone to USB drive then create an image of that? But I pulled it up the other day and the disk image size covered my whole hard drive, but when I mounted it I just saw the root system (I thought I lost all my backup data). Using DaisyDisk I saw a lot of "hidden space." I noticed Disk Utility mounted two disks; Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data, but Finder only showed the first on the desktop/sidebar and I had to hunt for the second under /Volumes/.

For simplicity I'm going to create a new disk image and pull out the relevant data. I never really had a need for a bootable backup on the network. I just figured I'd backup OS files in case I needed to pull up some oddball system hack I had on an old system.

[blacksmith_tb]

I have used CCC in past and liked it, I am currently using SuperDuper[1] which has also been good for keeping a bootable copy of my machine's SSD on an spare 2.5in SSD I had kicking around, in a cheap enclosure.

1: https://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.ht...

[AnonHP]

Can you expand on why you switched to SuperDuper!?

I’m in the opposite camp, having used (the free version of) SuperDuper! in the past but switched to CCC. SuperDuper! seemed to have a simpler interface. I’ve been using CCC since it seemed(to me) to have a better development cycle with quicker support for new releases of the OS. Maybe I was mistaken in thinking that, and maybe Shirt Pocket’s really old style website played a part in that. Recently I looked up the release history of SuperDuper! and found that V3 was released about three years ago. I’ve been trying to figure out if it provides a longer update path (for a particular cost) than CCC.

Note to readers: the seemingly weird punctuation you see in this comment is because the application is called “SuperDuper!” (with the exclamation).

[blacksmith_tb]

For me it was sort of the other way around, I had paid for a SuperDuper license years ago, and I went and looked at both it and CCC and saw that SD would work for backing up my new machine (which has Catalina on it out of the box). I agree that ShirtPocket's aesthetic is old skool for sure, but I have no complaints about the actual scheduled backups (well, actually one, which may not be their fault, I have it scheduled to dupe my SSD once a week in the middle of the night, and I notice that my machine won't sleep after that is completed).

[snapetom]

Thanks for the warning about TM to NAS. Out of curiosity, were you using HFS+ and AFP via hfsprogs and Netatalk?

I set up a Pi4 with an external drive attached to it via USB3 about a year ago. I wanted to set up a solution for me and my wife's Macs. There's plenty of "tutorials" out there and found there were all pretty much the same - HFS+ and AFP. If you follow them, they work great - for a few days.

Eventually all my Macs (Mojave and Catalina) would get a Time Machine error saying the backup was corrupted and would have to build a new version. This happened a couple of times, and eventually tried using SMB. That made the problem go away. All great, so I thought.

Then, any time I had a power outage, the whole file system on the drive would get corrupted. They could only be mounted as read only, and no amount of fsck fixed it. Switching from HFS+ to ext4 fixed that issue.

Things have been pretty reliable since then. I've been able to recover a few files here and there, but haven't had to fully recover from a disaster.

TL;DR - every blog that tells you to create a TM machine/Pi backup using hfsprogs and Netatalk is wrong. Don't do it that way. Use smb and ext4

[mrpippy]

That’s bizarre, I have no idea why anyone would recommend HFS+ for that. It’s a Linux system running Netatalk, which uses normal POSIX file I/O. ext4 is a far better choice.

Cargo-cult HOWTOs is the only explanation I can think of.

[snapetom]

> Cargo-cult HOWTOs is the only explanation I can think of.

Pretty much. When I google "raspberry Pi time machine," every result I see, except one, tells you to do the HFS+/AFP method. These results include content churning sites like techradar and howtogeek.

The only site that recommends ext4/smb that comes up, fourth on my list of results, is this one: https://mudge.name/2019/11/12/using-a-raspberry-pi-for-time-...

[duskwuff]

netatalk is also the wrong solution nowadays. AFP is unmaintained, both on the netatalk side and on macOS. Instead, Samba supports Time Machine backups via the "fruit" (!) extension, which also provides some nice performance improvements for macOS clients.

https://manpages.debian.org/buster/samba-vfs-modules/vfs_fru...

TL;DR though: add the following configuration to the global section of your smb.conf:

    vfs objects = fruit streams_xattr
    fruit:aapl = yes
    fruit:metadata = netatalk

And under the section for your Time Machine share:

    fruit:time machine = yes

[nikisweeting]

SMB on ZFS also works excellently, 4 years and counting with many power losses, ungraceful ejections, etc. never a corrupted backup.

[epmaybe]

Interesting. I have a backup using Netatalk, but on ext4. Are you saying a simple samba share should work just fine?

[snapetom]

Yes. I used these instructions:

https://mudge.name/2019/11/12/using-a-raspberry-pi-for-time-...

[pronoiac]

Out of curiosity, how long has it been since you switched to ext4?

[snapetom]

6 months. 3 power failures in the meantime and remounting has been flawless.

[dkonofalski]

Wouldn't this be intentional that you couldn't open a Time Machine backup from another user account? That feels like a really, really big security hole to be able to view the contents of files in a Time Machine backup on a machine that either wasn't the original or an account that wasn't restored from that same user account.

Otherwise, are you suggesting that you were able to authenticate the Time Machine volume and then were still unable to browse it within the UI?

[strogonoff]

I recall permission issues when I needed to recover a couple of files from a Time Machine backup from an old machine without restoring the whole volume. Made sense, I somehow worked around it though. Not sure I entered the old system’s credentials, I might have used the terminal with sudo or something, but memory is hazy.

Personally no issues with TM, except when it was working for too long initially I decided to wipe it and restart from scratch. (Don’t think it helped speed it up.)

That said I spend some time carefully picking which folders to include in the backup to avoid slowness and bloat.

[dkonofalski]

Again, though, isn't that intentional? If it wasn't, what would stop someone from, for example, stealing a Time Machine HDD and then having access to all the files on it? It's one thing to steal the origin machine but I was under the impression that TM is specifically designed not to allow access from other user accounts unless you know the credentials for the original account from which the backups are created. Is that not accurate? That seems like a giant security hole if it's not...

[dividedbyzero]

> That said I spend some time carefully picking which folders to include in the backup to avoid slowness and bloat.

What directories do you exclude? I feel like there must be lots of superfluous stuff in my backups but I don't understand macOS well enough to know for sure.

[wila]

Not OP, but you should exclude large files such as VMs [0] as those don't work well with Time Machine.

Disclaimer: I am the author of Vimalin [1], the tool that Howard references as a possible solution for VM backups.

[0] https://eclecticlight.co/2020/03/02/time-machine-15-large-fi...

[1] https://vimalin.com

[locusm]

I use CCC for full machine level backups that can be booted from in an emergency. I then do Restic backups daily direct to B2 Cloud Storage (Backblaze)

[leejoramo]

You can do. Bootable backup to a remote system. The initial back up needs to be done locally then the back up disk can be moved remote.

This was easier pre-Catalina

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/using-carbon-copy-cloner-back-up...