I posted ~7 months ago about my decision to use HFS+ for backups, and had a couple skeptical replies. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317123)
I guess I misjudged Apple's commitment to support HFS+ long-term.
It now seems like there's no real native way of doing encrypted backups to HDDs on macOS (APFS not really recommended for HDDs)... the options are either encrypted Time Machine to a network location, or a third-party tool.
Guess I'll figure out SuperDuper or Carbon Copy.
One thing I have learned with (current) Apple is to never trust their commitment to support something they're not using. And even be wary for stuff they are using. (in my mind, a core technical difference between Microsoft & Apple is that MS will bend over backwards for backwards compatibility, whereas Apple will drop it as soon as they can, and sometimes sooner still)
They replaced their use of HFS+ with APFS in 2017, so it's had a good run.
YAGNI is about not doing work in advance. it's very confusing to say YAGNI and pruning in the same breath. it's also confusing to call this aggressive since it's been 10 years.
i wouldn't call it dead code pruning either, since the code in question here was actually reachable and used. maybe, unmaintained code pruning?
(If I could create an encrypted external HFS+ volume, I would but macOS hasn't allowed that for a while as far as my experience goes - it's non-encrypted HFS+ or encrypted APFS.)
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/seca6147599e/...
It seems most of the problems with Time Machine happen when you try and run it over SMB. It's not that surprising when you realise what it is doing under that scenario. It creates a virtual disk on the remote and then formats it with APFS. You don't need much to go wrong to corrupt the backup in this scenario.
There are restrictions on where things can run, what can run, and what is accessible to the process.
SSHFS is slow, but at least can mount windows/linux/android systems over VPN without issues. Look at what is needed to bring up SSHFS or NTFS support, and you should have a better idea of Apples walled garden policies.
Apple makes information appliances, and not general-purpose computers. Some may disagree, but they usually choose an exception use-case rather than the normal experience of users. =3
this has a bonus feature where it will slowly corrupt itself over time and offer to start a completely new backup instead.
It seemed to stop killing itself when I moved to a ZFS backed samba share.
Funnily enough I also kept snapshots enabled because I was expecting TM to bork itself eventually, so I could always rollback to a working state but I don’t remember needing to use that.
The only thing that definitely made it worse was smb over openvpn. It'd corrupt itself every couple months instead of once or twice a year.
Before MacOS 27, I was always able to remove the Time Machine destination, replace the corrupted sparse bundle with a fresh empty one, and reconfigure that as the new TM destination. I even made a script for this, so I didn’t have to figure out the terminal commands every time.
Unfortunately the script doesn’t work anymore; it throws ‘error 25’ on my MacOS 27.
What’s weirdest is that, before the corruption, TM backup and restore used to work fine on my MacOS 27. Seemingly the backup functionality works as normal, but setting the TM destination was broken.
And personally I've never had networked backups get corrupted, dunno why.
I suppose HFS+ backups were more finicky over the network as well.
Be happy they let you backup to HDDs at all. :) They don't sell HDDs, so I'm half amazed they still work whatsoever.