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Comment by Weryj | Hacker News Reader

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Weryj

TimeMachine has never been so important.

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Arq does it better.

TimeMachine is worthless trash compared to restic

Please elaborate

It works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD. It's not locked to Apple's ecosystem. You can back up directly to local storage, SFTP, S3, Backblaze B2, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. Time Machine is largely limited to local drives or network shares. Restic deduplicates at the chunk level across all snapshots, often achieving better space efficiency than Time Machine's hardlink-based approach. All data is encrypted client-side before leaving your machine. Time Machine encryption is optional. Restic supports append-only mode for protection against ransomware or accidental deletion. It also has a built-in check command to check integrity.

Time Machine has a reputation for silent failures and corruption issues that have frustrated users for years. Network backups (to NAS devices) use sparse bundle disk images that are notoriously fragile. A dropped connection mid-backup can corrupt the entire backup history, not just the current snapshot. https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+corruption+spar...

Time Machine sometimes decides a backup is corrupted and demands you start fresh, losing all history. Backups can stop working without obvious notification, leaving users thinking they're protected when they're not. https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/11cod08/apple_tim...

The shift from HFS+ to APFS introduced new bugs, and local snapshots sometimes behave unpredictably. https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+restore+problem...

The backup metadata database can grow unwieldy and slow, eventually causing failures.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1cjebor/why_is_time_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/w7mkk9/time_machine_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1du5nc6/time_machine...

https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/omk7z7/is_a_time_machi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/ydfman/time_machine_ba...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1pfmiww/time_machine...

https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/lci6z0/time_machine_ex...

Time Machine is just garbage for ignorant people.

Almost all of my backup is around restic, including monitoring of backups (when they fail and when they do not run often enough).

It is a very solid setup, with 3 independent backups: local, nearby and far away.

Now - it took an awful lot of time to set up (including drinking the wrapper to account for everything). This is advanced IT level.

So Time Machine is not for ignorant people, but something everyone can use. (I never used it, no idea if it's good but it has to all last work)

One works, one loses your data. Oh well.

Guess there's a lot of money to be made wrapping it with a paid GUI

I am not sure what you are after, to be honest.

Restic is fantastic. And restic is complicated for someone who is not technical.

So there is a need to have something that works, even not in an optimal way, that saves people data.

Are you saying that Time Machine doe snot backup data correctly? But then there are other services that do.

Restic is not for the everyday Joe.

And to your point about "ignorant people" - it is as I was saying that you are an ignorant person because you do not create your own medicine, or produce your own electricity, or paint your own paintings, or build your own car. For a biochemist specializing in pharma (or Walt in Breaking Bad :)) you are an ignorant person unable to do the basic stuff: synthetizing paracetamol. It is a piece of cake.

But I just want to backup my important files to the cloud

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