Given the requirements of this particular task, this is the perfect choice. 3D navigation of the OS has been tried many times (Microsoft Bob anyone?), but to my mind, this is the only time it has really worked.
I think I would prefer a calendar view at the top, with dates/times that have snapshots highlighted, and a file manager view at the bottom. Kind of like Wayback Machine.
The name “Time Machine”, however, is genius.
The backups are (or at least used to be) simple files, with deduplication provided by hard links.
It would be great if they had a way to do both.
I don't know how many third-parties implemented it though.
I mostly use it for individual files too, but I end up "restoring" from a few different time points until I find what I'm looking for.
Is there a way to see in the Time Machine view that one particular file ("Figure_1.pdf") was changed on February 6th, March 1st, and March 10th?
Instead of scrolling through time using a 3D animation on the Z axis, I'd like to use a calendar instead. I said nothing about individual files.
I know whole backups were highly unreliable with TimeMachine, and this was a known problem.
I had to use it twice to setup a new replacement laptop with the same data as my old one. The first time it went smoothly, but the second time it failed badly.
I will note that I'm doing it over a network mount, not a local drive, and this is probably the source of the problem, but I never could resolve it. So I'm just back to rsync for specific directories. Which is fine, when this Mac dies, I'm moving to Linux.
I don't know that I'd say my own experience with Time Machine is perfect, but it's generally done what I needed to do, and has actually saved my bacon a few times by letting me restore individual files back to specific versions easily -- something I'm not sure an rsync-based solution would really provide (e.g., versioning for everything).
I‘ve said that many times and here I am, still working on a 2012 MBA refusing to die. But its performance is still fine anyways. Single core performance seems to only have about doubled since back then, so its not that much of a dealbreaker
Pure luck that the last reinstall was 2 months, and that version did back it all up. Lesson learned: don’t trust Time Machine. It’s a nice to have.
Acronis: fast, reliable, tracking UI that shows status for admins, can be centrally deployed while allowing users to set their password individually, supports different backup schedules/retention periods and quotas
TimeMachine: dog slow (unusably so on Wifi), no central tracking, once a week a user has to fully wipe their backup because it somehow got corrupt, fully manual deployment necessary as there is no way to implement encrypted timemachine backups from a script, no way of individual quotas or restricting backup history...
I wouldn't call Microsoft Bob "3D" at all. It didn't even use layering. It was a 2D program where a couple of the wallpapers depicted 3D scenes.