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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

To me, the distinguishing feature of Time Machine is that it reliably works. It worked reliably when I first bought a Mac 12 years ago, it works reliably today. I'll put up with the fact that it's slow and naive (file and hardlink based), and the UI gimmicks are kind of unimportant to me. I care about the recovery.

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I literally just today had to kiss 2 months of some folders goodbye because TimeMachine utterly randomly decided to stop backing them up. First it decided to stop backing up the home folder; happened to catch that before reformatting. When later I reformatted.... some folders in ~/Documents were empty. Ironically important ones (“archive - important” :( ). I sleuthed through logs, exception rules, everything: no rhyme or reason, no explanation. It just didn’t back them up.

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.

I'm glad it works for you, but I abandoned it due to unreliability. My experience has been that it works fine for some period of time and then the sparsebundle will randomly break. MacOS claims it is corrupted, I have to jump through hoops to make it work again.

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.

It was never real good about backing up over a network except with hardware specifically designed to support that, like network routers that support Time Machine drives (or Apple's own Time Capsule).

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).

> when this Mac dies, I'm moving to Linux.

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

TimeMachine and reliable? I manage a TimeMachine (Mac)+Acronis (Win) deployment at work (storage: QNAP TS 1635) and it's a freaking mess.

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...

Does it work reliably now?

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.

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