[riobard]

Not sure if the tone gets you downvoted but I can completely feel your rage…

I thought the animation was intentionally there to keep you engaged and hide the fact that Time Machine restoring is super slow, especially over network.

[DonHopkins]

Sorry for my frustrated tone, I've been grinding my gears about that for many years. Backups are not a game. The fact that I always have to "play the Time Machine Game" when under the stress of needing to retrieve something from my backup tends to make me pretty angry at the interface, yes!

Even if Time Machine were 100% reliable and didn't randomly trash your backup all the time, asking users to wait through all those gratuitous vanglorious Doctor Who animations to find out whether or not they're screwed is not very "Delicious".

If only they'd applied all that unbridled creativity to something harmless like the About This Mac box instead of the backup interface.