431 karma · joined May 25, 2022
Agreed. None of this is magic, and the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free. Many HN people even _build_ those platforms.
Would I like to see more controls around this? Yes, absolutely. Having some random app be able to read this data with only a single permission barrier is room for improvement. I would also like to see more tooling included to inspect and correct this data. Something like a Monica[1], but local and built on local data. Suddenly address book data is no longer a list of names and numbers, but a part of a data structure that you can use to surface information, like friend's preferences or vacation photos together. Not everything that collects data is insidious and a Black Mirror episode in the making.
The more specific you are, the less gotchas you're going to fall to.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...
I'm sure some people will like this update, but it's a big meh for me. I'll wait for some further updates to upgrade.
My biggest gripes with Time Machine are the lack of visibility, the silent failures and the inflexible scheduling. I know there are methods to work around the last one, but the first two are paramount. It does do consistency checking, at least as far as the logs say, but it says nothing about the health of the backup container.
While most users don't really want to know about this stuff, I feel like it's important enough to have a more comprehensive UI to provide some insight into the feature and the associated health.
I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.
I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.
My impression is that companies like Backblaze and other backup-as-a-service solutions are more consumer-popular because it externalizes the complexity and pitfalls like the author is experiencing.
However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them.
Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can check on your backups. Even if it's just a quick test of a restored file or folders.
Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?...
Sure, it's not as fast as SQLite or bigger systems, but often it's enough for smaller projects.
I like C, but it feels like you have to have an unhealthy amount of paranoia to write it well.
I wonder how this stacks up to Vaultwarden, which is really good.
Again, this was a hack. They should really be looking at fixing the issues with the startup time and slow performance of explorer, because even on vastly lesser machines, we've had near-to-instant startup times with, effectively, the same application.