[cjcampbell]

I’ve seen and experienced a variety of issues over the years, but my distrust of time machine is based on silent failures. I’ve been able to benefit from time machine backups when they were a convenient solution, but when they were really needed, I’ve seen them fail too many times. At one point, I discovered that my time machine backup had been silently failing to backup both photos and music for over a year.

A couple of years later, I helped a colleague piece his data back together after failures in his redundant time machine backups (kept at home and office) that he discovered after wiping/rebuilding his primary computer. One copy was missing the last months of data, despite him having connected the drive and watched it complete the backup just before wiping. The other was missing important folders from the home directory though it was fortunately up-to-date in all other places.