If you set Time Machine to use encrypted backups, it will create a fake disk that's really a directory tree with a bunch of gigabyte-sized binary chunks. This is safer because it doesn't require the file system to support anything fancy like symlinks or case-insensitive unicode file names. One downside is that restoring to anything other than a Mac is nontrivial.
This 100% - it’s funny how it’s actually more reliable in my experience to use the encrypted sparse bundle. I can sling it over to my NAS no problem. I’ve restored from one and everything was perfectly fine. YMMV of course
That was my experience at first, but then it gets corrupted somehow and you have to delete it and start over. Happened to me multiple times with RAID 1, so pretty sure it's a software error -- I eventually just gave up.
The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a network file system for backups? It's so fragile you can't rely on it. It's gotten better in recent years, possibly due to APFS, but that just means somewhat longer intervals between disasters (wipe out and reinitialize, losing all your backups). A T.M. using a custom protocol to save and restore blocks would fail sometimes too, but not ruin all your existing backups.
edit: I use Arq for daily backups, but T.M. for hourly. When T.M. eventually craters its storage, I have robust dailies in the cloud, so no worries.
Mounting a file system on a network share tightly couples the client to the server. It’s synchronous and it’s easy to leave the file system in an inconsistent state. Much more robust to build an asynchronous protocol with your own logic as rdbms do. You don’t see rdbms mounting remote file systems do you?
Outsider perspective here (never used Time Machine), but my first thought is that rsync works amazingly both local and over the network. Can't imagine why it being over the network would be a problem. If it can resume a partial transfer and compare checksums to ensure a match, what's the problem?
I'm a big fan of SuperDuper [1]. I use it for daily differential backups to a secondary SSD. I don't get the hourly backups that TimeMachine has, but my SuperDuper backups are directly bootable in the event that my system disk dies.
I'm sure you could do the same with cron and rsync, but I can't be bothered.
This has been on my to-buy list for a while. Something I should probably do, because while recovery from the built-in recovery interface is fine, having an offline bootable backup is also great. It also doesn't interfere with having Time Machine be the "standard" backup.
I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.
You can just use the UI to make whatever schedule you want (monthly, daily, every Monday, etc.). I think it edits your crontab behind the scenes. I set it to daily, but you could set whatever you want. You can even have multiple schedule entries, similar to cron.
Edit: Yeah, the bootable backups have saved me more than once. It's great to just be able to keep working even when the system disk is kaput.
I have been trying to trouble shoot a Time Machine issue since upgrading to Tahoe. It is usb backup. So far none of the most recent stated fixes work.
An initial backup on newly formatted disk will run but very slowly. Perhaps reaching 100% but it never finishes. At some point the percentage will change and the backup will stay stuck at somewhere near 10%. Cancel backup and run it again. Gets to ~10% and stays stuck. Multiple drives. Re-fs'ed. Boot into safe mode. Networking off. Etc, etc. etc. The TimeMachineMechanic app doesn't have any revealing feedback. I can run a full tar backup to the same disks.
No idea.
I haven't tried backing up to a network share but really, it shouldn't be this difficult.
Clearly someone didn't test a bunch of edge cases when pushing this one out.
log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine" AND NOT (category == "LogLimits" OR category == "VolumeViewModel")' --info --debug --style compact
and then start a backup (either from the menu bar icon, the system settings panel, or "tmutil startbackup"). This will tell you what Time Machine is doing, and might give you some useful information.
man log
where you can use "show" and a lookback period instead of "stream".
man tmutil
is pretty decent documentation, although the glossary secdtion ("BACKUP STRUCTURE") is important to understand if reading the whole man page.
Some things to look out for are what filesystem your newly formatted external volume is (APFS might not be great for a single spinny disk, for example), and what version of USB is in use (friends don't let friends do USB 2 mass storage). With inexpensive external media it's often a cable or power supply issue, even if (as in your case) tar appears to work. Have you checked that the contents of the tar file are correct? Also, tar files tend to be streamed out to sequential LBAs, where smaller files and (in Time Machine backups) holes might lead to a different write pattern that the drive might not like. Maybe test with rsync -c instead of tar?
Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?) but it's not really useable. It pretends that backups-over-the-network are a possibility but its completely unstable over the network and invariably decides the backup is corrupt after a few months and then tells you you have to start from scratch.
> Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?)
There was a time in the past when Time Machine was reliable and well-designed. It made backups into a nice experience that were accessible to everyone.
If your only experience with Time Machine is the modern incarnation with all of the flaws and seemingly missing QA process then I understand how its popularity would be confusing.
That tells a story. I bet its something like this:
1. There was a small, smart team which made time machine in the first place. They did good work. Building time machine required some pretty deep integrations into macos that not many people understood.
2. Years passed. The people who built time machine moved to greener pastures. At google and samsung you mostly get promoted for releasing new products. Not maintaining old ones. I wouldn't be surprised if its the same at apple. Over time, the people who made time machine left and were either replaced by more junior developers. Or weren't really replaced at all.
3. Random changes in the kernel break time machine regularly. Nobody is in charge of noticing breakage, or fixing it. Most people who care (and have the knowledge to fix it) have moved on.
I find things like this so odd from an organisational management perspective. Do companies not realise that features like time machine would have an ongoing maintenance cost? That someone would need to check that time machine still works with every release? Or is it just vibe based management out there? "I guess nobody works on that, and we don't test it. Oops whatever."
Every new manager who inherits a reputable product (anything, from software to food) is tempted by the idea of cutting costs drastically to the detriment of the product quality. While the product would be coasting on its prior reputation, the manager would get promoted for saving oodles of money, and promoted away from that product, or leave the company altogether. The one who comes next would take the blame, and handle the consequences.
I assume many managers resist this temptation, but someone yields with regularity.
> modern incarnation with all of the flaws and seemingly missing QA process
… so I’ve been kind of biting my tongue on this thread because “works fine for me” is not interesting or helpful, but: it’s been working great for me since it was introduced in 2007.
Periodically a disk will get flaky or go bad, maybe once every 2-3 years. I’ll erase the drive and start over. I always have two backups running so there’s never danger of being completely unprotected.
I don't doubt the people having Time Machine problems, but they usually seem to involve some unusual setup like a NAS. But for every one person who has a problem and speaks up, I suspect there are hundreds or thousands who are just humming along without a hitch.
(and yeah, I do pray for a "Snow Tahoe," "oops all bug-fixes" MacOS release, and I’d love to hear that there’s a team working not just to make Time Machine more resilient, but to expand it to do local backups of iPhones and iPads… a guy can dream)
> … so I’ve been kind of biting my tongue on this thread because “works fine for me” is not interesting or helpful, but: it’s been working great for me since it was introduced in 2007.
Is immediately contradicted by this
> Periodically a disk will get flaky or go bad, maybe once every 2-3 years. I’ll erase the drive and start over. I always have two backups running so there’s never danger of being completely unprotected.
Having to periodically erase the drive and start over is one of the problems we’re talking about.
In my experience, restoring files gets flakey before it reaches the point of having obvious backup failures so you may be experience more problems than you know about if this is happening periodically.
Exactly my experience. I've used TimeMachine with external USB drives, Apple's own TimeCapsule router (am I remembering that name correctly?), and various NASes. None of them could maintain a stable backup for a year. And you know, a backup that can't back up, isn't a backup.
I have since implemented a borg backup. This also failed at one point, but at least its five-year record remained readable, so no data was lost. Now I'm using restic.
I think because it is probably one of the only backup solutions (or first) that went after the average user to get them to actually backup. Plug a USB drive in, click yes to the prompt, and they’re done.
It has its flaws, but any system is better than no system at all, which is usually the trade off that would be made.
When backing up to a local system it is extremely useable and reliable. It creates separate snapshot volumes for each backup and can be navigated in the Finder interface or using the fancy space interface.
Also, backups over the network are possible and have worked well for me for a few years.
It's reliable except when it's not. I'm using Mojave, and currently fighting a bug where a local snapshot gets stuck. When I list the local snapshots, I see the old one, then a gap of several days, and then additional snapshots.
From what I can tell, this snapshot is preventing space reclamation. The last month or so, I've constantly run out of disk space even when not doing anything special. As in actually run out of disk space — apps start to become unresponsive or crash, and I get warning boxes about low disk space. When you run low, the OS is supposed to reclaim the space used by snapshots, but I guess it doesn't happen,
The stuck snapshot can't be deleted with tmutil. I get a generic "failed to delete" error. The snapshot is actually mounted by the backup daemon, but unmount also fails. The only solution I've found is to reboot. Then I get 200-300GB back and the cycle starts again, with snapshots getting stuck again.
I'm considering updating to Tahoe just because there's a chance they fixed it in that release.
On the extremely rare occasion I have to replace my laptop, I literally just point it to the backup on the network with the cable plugged in, and an hour later it's "my laptop" again.
Agreed, exactly matches my experience over SMB. It works at first, then eventually refuses to work until you delete it start again from scratch. Eventually I just gave up.
I finally got fed up with TM and switched to borg via Vorta. So much more reliable. A couple of times I've gotten error messages when I went off network while it was trying to do a backup, but each time the repo was fine.
Sometime around High Sierra, I changed my habit such that I don't upgrade to the next major release until August. By then, it's been patched a half dozen times or so. Yes, I'm basically a year behind all the time, but I don't need the new features.
Tahoe has made it so I will return to this upgrade strategy. I regret upgrading to Tahoe almost every day. If nothing else, the music apps on macOS and iOS cause me almost daily headaches.
Are you running Apple Silicon now? I’m still on an intel machine with Sequoia. I doubt that I’ll upgrade it to Tahoe this fall and stick with it until Sequoia stops receiving security updates. Then I’ll have to upgrade hardware I guess… hoping have things sorted by then.
If you set your Apple device to beta updates for the previous release you can suppress the constant prompts to upgrade. Reduces the chance of accidentally upgrading.
Be warned if you actually install beta software and take your device to the Apple Store they will not replace parts because of the chance the diagnostic tools aren’t compatible- this bit me trying to get my iPhone battery replaced
Settings -> General -> Software Update -> Beta Updates
It's the same on macOS and iOS, pick "macOS Sequoia Public Beta" or the corresponding release for your device. Apple still pushes security updates for those releases, and I haven't heard of any problems with the kind of minor updates that ship late in a major release's lifecycle, so I think the risk of running this way is low. This kicks the can a year or two down the road, at which point hopefully there are better workarounds.
Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during restoration.
> Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
I'd argue that's not even the main problem. If it just broke and gave you error on each run ("this SMB share is incompatible") it wouldn't be an issue
Just for the record: I wanted to see your content, but I couldn't because in Spain when there's football they block most websites to "avoid illegal football IP lists"... LaLiga can block anything they want without any restriction, even you website which I doubt about it. I can barely navigate... I will read it later tomorrow. This why you might see 0 traffic from Spain.
I never trusted Time Machine, my primary line of defense is rsync to a server running ZFS with hourly snapshots, and weekly rotations of offsite drives. For bootable backups, Carbon Copy Cloner.
I am a long-time CCC user, but bootable backups haven't been supported for a while now, basically since Big Sur -- if you're counting on that, make sure you're testing it regularly.
+1 for TM to ZFS - although over samba. A ZFS snapshot at each successful disconnection means any occasional corruption is simple to rollback.
Also I’m using nightly Arc backup to B2 of critical files.
mbentley's Docker image version of Time Machine—which I began using back when native Time Machine support was completely broken <https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/16x3ddm/my_experien...>—which the post mentions is unaffected, and continues to work with Tahoe without configuration changes.
I suspect that Time Machine is no longer used by a sufficiently large % of their customer base for them to care, and they are slowly sunsetting it. They are quite aggressive about that sort of thing, so I expect it to to deprecated in favour of iCloud soon.
I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted. My SMB settings in Synology were set to what the recommended settings were already. Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.
I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology.
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.
> 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
I don’t understand why people think this is complicated or limited only to highly technical people.
NAS units are popular with consumers now, not just tech people. They buy them with drives installed and they come with instructions to set up backups with Windows and Mac.
I get what you're saying. I will only quibble that the consumers in the market for a NAS, regardless of ease-of-setup, is still bordering technically inclined. My mother-in-law has enough trouble with her iPhone, let alone a server-type-device that she needs to administer.
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.
To the contrary. Time Machine is for consumers. Most people use it either with an external hard drive (good for iMacs that stay in one place) or a NAS (good for MacBooks). Apple even sold the AirPort Time Capsule at one point. Since that was discontinued, Synology NAS is the main consumer-friendly alternative. It comes with dedicated Time Machine support. It's supposed to be easy setup and forget. That's the whole point of using Synology instead of alternatives that require more technical expertise, that aren't designed for Time Machine support straight out of the box.
> [Synology] comes with dedicated Time Machine support
Your umbrance is with Synology, not Apple.
Apple raised security default configurations in Tahoe. That led to a config breakage with NAS devices which rely on relaxed security configurations.
I agree Apple should publish a technical note / changelog of config changes such as this one, but Apple has never implied to users they'd carry a support burden for any/all third-party hardware vendors. To the contrary, they've notified users that you're meant to consult with your NAS vendor for configuration steps:
> Check the documentation of your NAS device for help setting it up for use with Time Machine
I wasn't even assigning blame, did you mean to reply to someone else?
I was just replying to your point that a Synology NAS "is not what most users would consider 'consumer technology.'" It's firmly in the consumer technology category.
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 use a self-hosted healthchecks.io watchdog timer instance to monitor jobs like these and alert if they don’t complete. Of course TimeMachine doesn’t have a way to signal successful completion, unlike, say, Carbon Copy Cloner. Given Apple software quality’s accelerating downward trend, I’d suggest switching to rsync/rclone instead, or Borg/Kopia if you want GUI-driven restores for non-technical members of your family.
It’s long past time you flipped the bozo switch on Apple, the title of your blog notwithstanding.
Time Machine is for the everyday person. The everyday person doesn’t have a few thousand dollars to buy a second machine just to properly test a full restore backup periodically.
They don’t cost that much. And there are cheaper options.
Most computers Apple sells are laptops. By a huge margin.
So what am I supposed to do? Put my laptop in the same spot every night, plug it in, plug in the drive, and then the next morning carefully make sure the drive is unmounted before I move my laptop anywhere?
That’s kind of ridiculous. Network storage works. Apple has supported it for years.
If they don’t want to support this, don’t let the OS do it. Until then, don’t break my backups.
I don't have a second machine to do a full restore. I just do spot checks every month to see if I'm able to restore files from various locations. It's not scientific, but it's helpful to know if a spot check fails, that there may be a larger issue.
Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.
Just as a quick follow up, I completely forgot about the tool BackupLoupe[1]. It allows you to slice into your existing Time Machine backups and find out all manner of information on what's going on, what is backed up, when and what is taking up so much space.
Also running Tahoe. Also backing up to SynologyNAS.
Also have lost 'many' backup to unknown reasons (was it a new beta? Was it a new OS? , the NAS crash of 2025) whatever.
Also, I don't even have an /etc/nsmb.conf or /etc/smb.conf file on the mac ( Tahoe 26.3)
I think the last time I configured Time Machine for SynologyNAS I followed as many tutorials as I could and basically everything is working for both mine & my spouses machines. - until it crashes & I lose everything.
Time Machine has always been a bit ropey on SMB shares. I think it’s in part because it creates a disk image on the share then writes to that. This creates a lot more work and potential for things to go wrong.
If you want to backup across the network then it’s probably best to choose some third party software.
What is Apple’s QA process? Do they rely on some random set of manual tests that may or may not get run each release? There have been so many things that seem like one of the most valuable companies in the world would include in tests, but yet break or remain broken.
As an experiment, open Console and filter just errors and faults. Dozens to hundreds of “errors” will scroll by representing the normal operation of the system. (Either they’re not really errors and no one cares or they really are errors and Apple just leaves their systems broken). How can anyone think this is OK?
I haven’t upgraded to Tahoe. I have been a Mac power user for over 20 years, and it becomes less interesting every release. I came for Unix, the script ability, and 3ᴿᴰ party applications. Unix is an afterthought, script ability is all gated behind security gates, and modern apps seem like such a huge regression.
1) Every team does something different because none of them talk to each other. There are very few horizontal programs across engineering there. As a result, processes and results vary greatly.
2) They're very "traditional" in many ways. They're not a fast moving engineering led company, they're a slow moving business and marketing led company. Engineering is not their secret sauce (except perhaps some bits of hardware engineering). They are sometimes the sort of org that says why both with automated tests when we have a QA team.
Apple has always had problems with SMB since they switched from one of the open-source implementations to one it internally developed, many yaers ago.
Then again, SMB especially in its newer versions seems to be a protocol developed by MS with one of its goals being to make third-party implementations as difficult as possible.
I still don't understand why people insist on spending good money on a closed, proprietary appliance when they can run a general purpose, flexible server such as running Samba and NFS that can be tweaked to solve a variety of edge-cases that no closed system can match.
I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe. Seems to work fine with no local configuration changes. Just make sure in SMB global configuration you:
- Enable Apple SMB2/3 Protocol Extensions
And when creating the SMB share select Time Machine for purpose.
you're probably backing up things that change very often you don't care about? Figure out what's taking up space in each backup and use `tmutil excludepath -p <dir>`.
Damn... my only guess: time machine backups are VERY write heavy. Is it a reputable brand of SSD? Is time machine frequently erasing old backups? Many external portable SSDs that work fine for regular consumer uses, might struggle to handle the write volume of time machine backups. I've used 2 external SSDs with time machine and never had them fail. (T7 Samsung SSDs)
Also you'd want the SSDs to be much larger than what you need to backup. If they're small, then time machine will have to erase the older backups to make new backups, which just leads to more rewrites, stressing the SSD more. The ones I used were 4TB, but a clean first backup of my system was only like 250GB (because many things excluded). And then daily incremental backups are like 1-3GB.
I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS — just mentioned it in an article today as “works great, until it inevitably and catastrophically fails”.
Reliable for me is Kopia from Mac to S3 compatible volume (minio) on Synology.
I would try to do some restores of random files. Kind of a "canary in the coal mine" test. If you have problems with restoring some files or folders, then you'll have a problem with doing larger restores.
I agree - I am running my own Samba server and I don't think I'm affected, but it isn't really clear to me how to double check or why Apple's new default broke things in the first place
You could create a timestamp file on your Mac, where your Mac adds a timestamp per day or hour and have a script check that the timestamps appear in your backup.
Hi! OP here. In my case Time Machine stopped doing backups to the server, period, and would keep silently refusing to do so. I encourage you to check backups are happening.
On Tahoe my Time Machine was broken after the update. My backup target is on a QNAP NAS. I just had to set it up from scratch again and it worked. But it did cost me a few files I was trying to recover. So I feel this.
I did indeed switch to restic for everyday backup. Here I wrote about how to set it up so it has full disk access, uses TochID to access the secret and runs daily: https://github.com/patte/restic-macos-app
Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine.
Look, face it, Time Machine is not really what Apple wants you to do. They want you to buy cloud storage and just store your documents (desktop and documents in iCloud Drive) there. Photos are in the photos app. Etc.
Maybe they should make a Time Machine cloud service to help them justify putting time into it just like iOS has cloud backups, which work incredibly smoothly. But it’s also possible macOS has too much baggage for that to work (then again, migration assistant also seems to work great.
Long story short, if you want this you probably should be working with a third party, something like tossing $5 a month at backblaze backup.
I’ve moved away from Mac and I’ve been having a great user experience with Pika backup, although it’s not quite analogous to Time Machine. Still, my Linux distribution is immutable, so backing up my home directory is pretty much the whole thing.
I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.
The last straw is that Finder's scroll bars are broken in Tahoe. I put up with it until I hit an emergency at work and was working as fast as I could (each minute mattered), Tahoe was slowing me down. Tahoe didn't pass the pressure test.
> I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.
Yeah, this is most I’ve regretted updating macOS in a decade. Apple Music in Tahoe is no longer capable of playing LAN-shared music without bugging out, which is a real bummer for my normal workflow of listening to music all day while I work.
Avoid it as long as possible. Mail search is broken 4 out of 5 days that I attempt a search, and I need to go to the webmail versions of my accounts to find anything. Fortunately it's only something I need to do about once a day, unlike in prior lives, but holy crap they took the best ruing about macOS and kids destroyed jt completely.
Plasma on Linux is looking pretty tempting these days, especially with almost all office software being web based these days.
Switching email clients is a big lift that I need to investigate, and have been hesitant to jump into until absolutely necessary, but another week of this BS...
Somewhat related but I was disappointed to learn that Time Machine would no longer support Time Capsule post Tahoe, which I suppose is fair 8 years post discontinuation, but also unfortunate considering AFAICT the only real potential issue would be HDD degradation over the years? At the least, there have been plenty of system alerts noting this fact, but still annoying to have to buy something else. I know both AirPort and Time Capsule were an infinitesimally small part of their business...but they absolutely rocked when they were launched.
Apple has broken Time Machine enough times that I would never consider using it at all anymore. Once upon a time, it was really neat, had great integration with Mac OS X, and an amazing user interface and experience, but it's now clearly technology that Apple will probably eventually drop entirely in favor of something less impressive all together, like telling you to buy more iCloud Storage.
Hasn't the issues always been related to remote Time Machine? I have a usb drive I use and haven't heard of any issues with that setup. Am I missing something?
In the past, I've heard recommendations not to use remote Time Machine over SMB directly, but rather to create an APFS disk image on a remote server and then backup to that as if its an external hard drive.
Supposedly, doing that eliminates a lot of the flakiness specific to SMB Time Machine, and while I haven't tested it personally, I have used disk images over SMB on macOS Tahoe recently, and they actually work great (other than the normal underlying annoyances of SMB that everyone with a NAS is mostly used to at this point).
The new ASIF format for disk images added in Tahoe actually works very well for this sort of thing, and gives you the benefits of sparse bundle disk images without requiring specific support for them on the underlying file system.[1][2] As long as you're on a file system that supports sparse files (I think pretty much every currently used file system except FAT32, exFAT, and very old implementations of HFS+), you get almost native performance out of the disk image now. (Although, again, that's just fixing the disk image overhead, you still have to work around the usual SMB weirdness unless you can get another remote file system protocol working.)
I tried moving to NFS, but the level of complexity of NFS auth is just comical. I gave up after trying to set up a Kerberos server on the Synology that I was trying to access. It's too much.
Using unauthenticated NFS, even on a local network, is too dodgy imo.
I lose my Time Machine drive, like, every year or two.
Sometimes, Time Machine just goes stupid and I have to wipe the drive and start over. All of my efforts in the past to copy or repair or do anything to a Time Machine drive has ended in folly, so when it starts acting up, I just wipe it and start anew.
Other times, it's the drive itself, and I swap it out.
99% of the time, it Just Works. Wiping the drive for me is more annoying than catastrophic (99.9999% of the time I don't care about my 18 month old data). It's mostly for local catastrophic fat fingering on my part, and to make sure I have a solid back up after I do a OS update. I have BackBlaze for "Why is there 5 feet mud in my burning house" scenarios.
Outside of that, I've always been able to recover from it.
My wife has a SSD drive she plugs into her laptop for TM backup. That machine at most makes laps around the house, so its not that big of a deal for her.
If you set Time Machine to use encrypted backups, it will create a fake disk that's really a directory tree with a bunch of gigabyte-sized binary chunks. This is safer because it doesn't require the file system to support anything fancy like symlinks or case-insensitive unicode file names. One downside is that restoring to anything other than a Mac is nontrivial.
This 100% - it’s funny how it’s actually more reliable in my experience to use the encrypted sparse bundle. I can sling it over to my NAS no problem. I’ve restored from one and everything was perfectly fine. YMMV of course
That was my experience at first, but then it gets corrupted somehow and you have to delete it and start over. Happened to me multiple times with RAID 1, so pretty sure it's a software error -- I eventually just gave up.
Have you run memtest on the machine in question? That kind of problem sounds like a classic bad RAM symptom.
Unencrypted sparse bundles for TM can also be created for non-TM supported network locations.
The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a network file system for backups? It's so fragile you can't rely on it. It's gotten better in recent years, possibly due to APFS, but that just means somewhat longer intervals between disasters (wipe out and reinitialize, losing all your backups). A T.M. using a custom protocol to save and restore blocks would fail sometimes too, but not ruin all your existing backups.
edit: I use Arq for daily backups, but T.M. for hourly. When T.M. eventually craters its storage, I have robust dailies in the cloud, so no worries.
> The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a network file system for backups?
The problem is them fucking up. Every other popular backup solution that does it does it just fine. And doesn't hide failures silently
> The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a network file system for backups?
As opposed to what? When you need to be able to back up to a drive on your network?
Mounting a file system on a network share tightly couples the client to the server. It’s synchronous and it’s easy to leave the file system in an inconsistent state. Much more robust to build an asynchronous protocol with your own logic as rdbms do. You don’t see rdbms mounting remote file systems do you?
Outsider perspective here (never used Time Machine), but my first thought is that rsync works amazingly both local and over the network. Can't imagine why it being over the network would be a problem. If it can resume a partial transfer and compare checksums to ensure a match, what's the problem?
It's backups, not sync, so it needs to support things like incrementals/differentials, deduplication, retention rules, thinning, etc.
I'm a big fan of SuperDuper [1]. I use it for daily differential backups to a secondary SSD. I don't get the hourly backups that TimeMachine has, but my SuperDuper backups are directly bootable in the event that my system disk dies.
I'm sure you could do the same with cron and rsync, but I can't be bothered.
[1] https://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.ht...
This has been on my to-buy list for a while. Something I should probably do, because while recovery from the built-in recovery interface is fine, having an offline bootable backup is also great. It also doesn't interfere with having Time Machine be the "standard" backup.
I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.
You can just use the UI to make whatever schedule you want (monthly, daily, every Monday, etc.). I think it edits your crontab behind the scenes. I set it to daily, but you could set whatever you want. You can even have multiple schedule entries, similar to cron.
Edit: Yeah, the bootable backups have saved me more than once. It's great to just be able to keep working even when the system disk is kaput.
> I don't get the hourly backups that TimeMachine has, but my SuperDuper backups are directly bootable in the event that my system disk dies.
Well as long as Apple hasn’t broken that with an update: https://www.shirtpocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/youre_...
I have been trying to trouble shoot a Time Machine issue since upgrading to Tahoe. It is usb backup. So far none of the most recent stated fixes work.
An initial backup on newly formatted disk will run but very slowly. Perhaps reaching 100% but it never finishes. At some point the percentage will change and the backup will stay stuck at somewhere near 10%. Cancel backup and run it again. Gets to ~10% and stays stuck. Multiple drives. Re-fs'ed. Boot into safe mode. Networking off. Etc, etc. etc. The TimeMachineMechanic app doesn't have any revealing feedback. I can run a full tar backup to the same disks.
No idea.
I haven't tried backing up to a network share but really, it shouldn't be this difficult.
Clearly someone didn't test a bunch of edge cases when pushing this one out.
In a terminal window run
and then start a backup (either from the menu bar icon, the system settings panel, or "tmutil startbackup"). This will tell you what Time Machine is doing, and might give you some useful information. where you can use "show" and a lookback period instead of "stream". is pretty decent documentation, although the glossary secdtion ("BACKUP STRUCTURE") is important to understand if reading the whole man page.Some things to look out for are what filesystem your newly formatted external volume is (APFS might not be great for a single spinny disk, for example), and what version of USB is in use (friends don't let friends do USB 2 mass storage). With inexpensive external media it's often a cable or power supply issue, even if (as in your case) tar appears to work. Have you checked that the contents of the tar file are correct? Also, tar files tend to be streamed out to sequential LBAs, where smaller files and (in Time Machine backups) holes might lead to a different write pattern that the drive might not like. Maybe test with rsync -c instead of tar?
Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?) but it's not really useable. It pretends that backups-over-the-network are a possibility but its completely unstable over the network and invariably decides the backup is corrupt after a few months and then tells you you have to start from scratch.
> Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?)
There was a time in the past when Time Machine was reliable and well-designed. It made backups into a nice experience that were accessible to everyone.
If your only experience with Time Machine is the modern incarnation with all of the flaws and seemingly missing QA process then I understand how its popularity would be confusing.
That tells a story. I bet its something like this:
1. There was a small, smart team which made time machine in the first place. They did good work. Building time machine required some pretty deep integrations into macos that not many people understood.
2. Years passed. The people who built time machine moved to greener pastures. At google and samsung you mostly get promoted for releasing new products. Not maintaining old ones. I wouldn't be surprised if its the same at apple. Over time, the people who made time machine left and were either replaced by more junior developers. Or weren't really replaced at all.
3. Random changes in the kernel break time machine regularly. Nobody is in charge of noticing breakage, or fixing it. Most people who care (and have the knowledge to fix it) have moved on.
I find things like this so odd from an organisational management perspective. Do companies not realise that features like time machine would have an ongoing maintenance cost? That someone would need to check that time machine still works with every release? Or is it just vibe based management out there? "I guess nobody works on that, and we don't test it. Oops whatever."
Every new manager who inherits a reputable product (anything, from software to food) is tempted by the idea of cutting costs drastically to the detriment of the product quality. While the product would be coasting on its prior reputation, the manager would get promoted for saving oodles of money, and promoted away from that product, or leave the company altogether. The one who comes next would take the blame, and handle the consequences.
I assume many managers resist this temptation, but someone yields with regularity.
> modern incarnation with all of the flaws and seemingly missing QA process
… so I’ve been kind of biting my tongue on this thread because “works fine for me” is not interesting or helpful, but: it’s been working great for me since it was introduced in 2007.
Periodically a disk will get flaky or go bad, maybe once every 2-3 years. I’ll erase the drive and start over. I always have two backups running so there’s never danger of being completely unprotected.
I don't doubt the people having Time Machine problems, but they usually seem to involve some unusual setup like a NAS. But for every one person who has a problem and speaks up, I suspect there are hundreds or thousands who are just humming along without a hitch.
(and yeah, I do pray for a "Snow Tahoe," "oops all bug-fixes" MacOS release, and I’d love to hear that there’s a team working not just to make Time Machine more resilient, but to expand it to do local backups of iPhones and iPads… a guy can dream)
This
> … so I’ve been kind of biting my tongue on this thread because “works fine for me” is not interesting or helpful, but: it’s been working great for me since it was introduced in 2007.
Is immediately contradicted by this
> Periodically a disk will get flaky or go bad, maybe once every 2-3 years. I’ll erase the drive and start over. I always have two backups running so there’s never danger of being completely unprotected.
Having to periodically erase the drive and start over is one of the problems we’re talking about.
In my experience, restoring files gets flakey before it reaches the point of having obvious backup failures so you may be experience more problems than you know about if this is happening periodically.
Exactly my experience. I've used TimeMachine with external USB drives, Apple's own TimeCapsule router (am I remembering that name correctly?), and various NASes. None of them could maintain a stable backup for a year. And you know, a backup that can't back up, isn't a backup.
I have since implemented a borg backup. This also failed at one point, but at least its five-year record remained readable, so no data was lost. Now I'm using restic.
Arq for me.
I think because it is probably one of the only backup solutions (or first) that went after the average user to get them to actually backup. Plug a USB drive in, click yes to the prompt, and they’re done.
It has its flaws, but any system is better than no system at all, which is usually the trade off that would be made.
> maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?
That's why I like it. Some of the visual flare is of course superfluous, but the timeline really is nice.
It's like git except it works without me having to think about it. (To be clear, git is much better, but I have to think about it.)
When backing up to a local system it is extremely useable and reliable. It creates separate snapshot volumes for each backup and can be navigated in the Finder interface or using the fancy space interface.
Also, backups over the network are possible and have worked well for me for a few years.
It's reliable except when it's not. I'm using Mojave, and currently fighting a bug where a local snapshot gets stuck. When I list the local snapshots, I see the old one, then a gap of several days, and then additional snapshots.
From what I can tell, this snapshot is preventing space reclamation. The last month or so, I've constantly run out of disk space even when not doing anything special. As in actually run out of disk space — apps start to become unresponsive or crash, and I get warning boxes about low disk space. When you run low, the OS is supposed to reclaim the space used by snapshots, but I guess it doesn't happen,
The stuck snapshot can't be deleted with tmutil. I get a generic "failed to delete" error. The snapshot is actually mounted by the backup daemon, but unmount also fails. The only solution I've found is to reboot. Then I get 200-300GB back and the cycle starts again, with snapshots getting stuck again.
I'm considering updating to Tahoe just because there's a chance they fixed it in that release.
Mojave is 7 years old so I think its safe to say you can't generalize
I meant Sequoia, but I can't edit my comment anymore. I've completely lost track of the OS releases after they stopped emphasizing the number.
Ah, gotcha - never mind then.
I doubt it. Good luck.
I think I have the same problem on Tahoe.
idk, works for me.
On the extremely rare occasion I have to replace my laptop, I literally just point it to the backup on the network with the cable plugged in, and an hour later it's "my laptop" again.
Agreed, exactly matches my experience over SMB. It works at first, then eventually refuses to work until you delete it start again from scratch. Eventually I just gave up.
Exactly right.
With external SSDs plugged directly into a USB port, it's worked 100% fine for me and saved my butt a few times.
But, I haven't installed Tahoe. I may skip it entirely, hoping that they do a Snow Leopard-like clean-up-the-mess release in September.
I finally got fed up with TM and switched to borg via Vorta. So much more reliable. A couple of times I've gotten error messages when I went off network while it was trying to do a backup, but each time the repo was fine.
macOS yearly updates haven't been great since they started but Tahoe is a new low.
Apple really needs to turn things around.
Sometime around High Sierra, I changed my habit such that I don't upgrade to the next major release until August. By then, it's been patched a half dozen times or so. Yes, I'm basically a year behind all the time, but I don't need the new features.
Tahoe has made it so I will return to this upgrade strategy. I regret upgrading to Tahoe almost every day. If nothing else, the music apps on macOS and iOS cause me almost daily headaches.
Since Yosemite (which was really bad for me) I typically stay with a major version 2-3 years.
Yosemite > El Capitan > High Sierra > Big Sur > Ventura > Sequoia
I won't be installing Tahoe for the time being. Hoping macOS 27 will be an improvement.
Are you running Apple Silicon now? I’m still on an intel machine with Sequoia. I doubt that I’ll upgrade it to Tahoe this fall and stick with it until Sequoia stops receiving security updates. Then I’ll have to upgrade hardware I guess… hoping have things sorted by then.
I had so many corrupted Time Machine backups over the years that I eventually just wrote an incremental backup script in rsync. I’m much happier.
Something like [1] can be inspiration.
[1]: https://github.com/perfacilis/backup
I had the exact same experience and did the exact same thing. I also moved my backups from HFS+ to zfs, and got more serious about my backup strategy.
If I had to start over I'd go with rustic-rs or borg backup.
FWIW I do still use `tmutil localsnapshot` for local macOS snapshots where you can use the Time Machine UI to restore files.
If you set your Apple device to beta updates for the previous release you can suppress the constant prompts to upgrade. Reduces the chance of accidentally upgrading.
Be warned if you actually install beta software and take your device to the Apple Store they will not replace parts because of the chance the diagnostic tools aren’t compatible- this bit me trying to get my iPhone battery replaced
The hedgehog knows one great thing. This is it. Thank you.
How do you do that?
Settings -> General -> Software Update -> Beta Updates
It's the same on macOS and iOS, pick "macOS Sequoia Public Beta" or the corresponding release for your device. Apple still pushes security updates for those releases, and I haven't heard of any problems with the kind of minor updates that ship late in a major release's lifecycle, so I think the risk of running this way is low. This kicks the can a year or two down the road, at which point hopefully there are better workarounds.
Thanks!
Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during restoration.
> Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
I'd argue that's not even the main problem. If it just broke and gave you error on each run ("this SMB share is incompatible") it wouldn't be an issue
Is that 5% number real or your estimate?
It's a hand-waved estimate, but let's recognize that Apple actively plans on killing support for NAS targets for Time Machine:
> Time Machine backup to NAS devices over Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is not recommended and won't be supported in a future version of macOS.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423
AFP is what's deprecated, not Time Machine over networks. They just want you to use SMB.
Acknowledged. Thanks for pointing that out.
But that's AFP, not SMB. SMB is the future. [edit, that sounds sad].
Yeah, it sounds a bit high to me.
People with laptops that don't want to be attached to a dongle for storage when there's the Internet sounds like < 5% to you?
The original post was about people who backup to a local server, not over the internet.
Just for the record: I wanted to see your content, but I couldn't because in Spain when there's football they block most websites to "avoid illegal football IP lists"... LaLiga can block anything they want without any restriction, even you website which I doubt about it. I can barely navigate... I will read it later tomorrow. This why you might see 0 traffic from Spain.
I read about this a few months back (I think someone posted a link to a Reddit discussion about it). It's so bizarre!
I never trusted Time Machine, my primary line of defense is rsync to a server running ZFS with hourly snapshots, and weekly rotations of offsite drives. For bootable backups, Carbon Copy Cloner.
I am a long-time CCC user, but bootable backups haven't been supported for a while now, basically since Big Sur -- if you're counting on that, make sure you're testing it regularly.
https://bombich.com/blog/2024/12/19/bootable-backups-have-be...
+1 for Carbon Copy Cloner. Rock-solid reliable and well-supported.
https://bombich.com
+1 for TM to ZFS - although over samba. A ZFS snapshot at each successful disconnection means any occasional corruption is simple to rollback. Also I’m using nightly Arc backup to B2 of critical files.
Tahoe backups to UnRAID's native Time Machine backup system (as described at <https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/using-unraid-to/manage-sto...>) does not work in UnRAID 7.2.3. It is not (solely) caused by Tahoe, however, because it did work in 7.1.4. <https://forums.unraid.net/topic/195091-time-machine-backup-d...>
mbentley's Docker image version of Time Machine—which I began using back when native Time Machine support was completely broken <https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/16x3ddm/my_experien...>—which the post mentions is unaffected, and continues to work with Tahoe without configuration changes.
I suspect that Time Machine is no longer used by a sufficiently large % of their customer base for them to care, and they are slowly sunsetting it. They are quite aggressive about that sort of thing, so I expect it to to deprecated in favour of iCloud soon.
That's not a backup.
I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted. My SMB settings in Synology were set to what the recommended settings were already. Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.
> but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.
For a professional devops person managing a custom backup solution, I agree.
For someone using mainstream consumer technology on a consumer laptop, it's not realistic to expect this. It needs to just work.
I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology.
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.
> 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
I don’t understand why people think this is complicated or limited only to highly technical people.
NAS units are popular with consumers now, not just tech people. They buy them with drives installed and they come with instructions to set up backups with Windows and Mac.
I get what you're saying. I will only quibble that the consumers in the market for a NAS, regardless of ease-of-setup, is still bordering technically inclined. My mother-in-law has enough trouble with her iPhone, let alone a server-type-device that she needs to administer.
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.
> I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.
The problem is that the typical consumer with a laptop never uses it in a docked configuration and just plugs it in to charge.
You may as well tell someone they need to regularly plug a USB hard drive into their iphone to back up their photos.
> For someone using consumer technology on a consumer laptop
Mounting an SMB share on a Synology NAS to use as a Time Machine backup target is not what most users would consider "consumer technology."
To the contrary. Time Machine is for consumers. Most people use it either with an external hard drive (good for iMacs that stay in one place) or a NAS (good for MacBooks). Apple even sold the AirPort Time Capsule at one point. Since that was discontinued, Synology NAS is the main consumer-friendly alternative. It comes with dedicated Time Machine support. It's supposed to be easy setup and forget. That's the whole point of using Synology instead of alternatives that require more technical expertise, that aren't designed for Time Machine support straight out of the box.
> [Synology] comes with dedicated Time Machine support
Your umbrance is with Synology, not Apple.
Apple raised security default configurations in Tahoe. That led to a config breakage with NAS devices which rely on relaxed security configurations.
I agree Apple should publish a technical note / changelog of config changes such as this one, but Apple has never implied to users they'd carry a support burden for any/all third-party hardware vendors. To the contrary, they've notified users that you're meant to consult with your NAS vendor for configuration steps:
> Check the documentation of your NAS device for help setting it up for use with Time Machine
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423
I wasn't even assigning blame, did you mean to reply to someone else?
I was just replying to your point that a Synology NAS "is not what most users would consider 'consumer technology.'" It's firmly in the consumer technology category.
That’s definitely in the range of what consumers do these days.
The consumer NAS business is large. These are popular items with average consumers who understand the importance of backups.
It’s reasonable to expect it to work properly.
This is true. If the user was capable of testing his backups, he would not be using a Mac in the first place.
> Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.
Regardless he should've gotten alert if backup target is unusable, not silently break
100%
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.
Hi! OP here. No, that was not it. Time Machine just quietly failed to do any backups and I failed to notice they weren't happening.
I use a self-hosted healthchecks.io watchdog timer instance to monitor jobs like these and alert if they don’t complete. Of course TimeMachine doesn’t have a way to signal successful completion, unlike, say, Carbon Copy Cloner. Given Apple software quality’s accelerating downward trend, I’d suggest switching to rsync/rclone instead, or Borg/Kopia if you want GUI-driven restores for non-technical members of your family.
It’s long past time you flipped the bozo switch on Apple, the title of your blog notwithstanding.
I am using Borg Backup on Fedora, so that’s coming.
Yes, just saw your post on Vorta. I myself am ditching Apple platforms due to creeping enshittification, but I doubt my wife will.
Time Machine is for the everyday person. The everyday person doesn’t have a few thousand dollars to buy a second machine just to properly test a full restore backup periodically.
They don’t cost that much. And there are cheaper options.
Most computers Apple sells are laptops. By a huge margin.
So what am I supposed to do? Put my laptop in the same spot every night, plug it in, plug in the drive, and then the next morning carefully make sure the drive is unmounted before I move my laptop anywhere?
That’s kind of ridiculous. Network storage works. Apple has supported it for years.
If they don’t want to support this, don’t let the OS do it. Until then, don’t break my backups.
I don't have a second machine to do a full restore. I just do spot checks every month to see if I'm able to restore files from various locations. It's not scientific, but it's helpful to know if a spot check fails, that there may be a larger issue.
Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.
Just as a quick follow up, I completely forgot about the tool BackupLoupe[1]. It allows you to slice into your existing Time Machine backups and find out all manner of information on what's going on, what is backed up, when and what is taking up so much space.
[1]: https://www.soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/
Also running Tahoe. Also backing up to SynologyNAS. Also have lost 'many' backup to unknown reasons (was it a new beta? Was it a new OS? , the NAS crash of 2025) whatever.
Also, I don't even have an /etc/nsmb.conf or /etc/smb.conf file on the mac ( Tahoe 26.3)
I think the last time I configured Time Machine for SynologyNAS I followed as many tutorials as I could and basically everything is working for both mine & my spouses machines. - until it crashes & I lose everything.
Time Machine has always been a bit ropey on SMB shares. I think it’s in part because it creates a disk image on the share then writes to that. This creates a lot more work and potential for things to go wrong.
If you want to backup across the network then it’s probably best to choose some third party software.
What is Apple’s QA process? Do they rely on some random set of manual tests that may or may not get run each release? There have been so many things that seem like one of the most valuable companies in the world would include in tests, but yet break or remain broken.
As an experiment, open Console and filter just errors and faults. Dozens to hundreds of “errors” will scroll by representing the normal operation of the system. (Either they’re not really errors and no one cares or they really are errors and Apple just leaves their systems broken). How can anyone think this is OK?
I haven’t upgraded to Tahoe. I have been a Mac power user for over 20 years, and it becomes less interesting every release. I came for Unix, the script ability, and 3ᴿᴰ party applications. Unix is an afterthought, script ability is all gated behind security gates, and modern apps seem like such a huge regression.
> What is Apple’s QA process?
"Does this increase iCloud subscriptions or not?"
Ding ding ding we have a winner!
A colleague joined the team for one of the most visible features in MacOS a few years ago and told me they had no automated testing.
Two things are almost always true about Apple:
1) Every team does something different because none of them talk to each other. There are very few horizontal programs across engineering there. As a result, processes and results vary greatly.
2) They're very "traditional" in many ways. They're not a fast moving engineering led company, they're a slow moving business and marketing led company. Engineering is not their secret sauce (except perhaps some bits of hardware engineering). They are sometimes the sort of org that says why both with automated tests when we have a QA team.
I think they mostly test in an all-apple environment.
With third party stuff, maybe you'll get lucky, but no guarantees...
3rd party monitors, or keyboards, or mice (what's a mouse?) or ...SMB devices
They didn’t have qa for MacOS when I might have known someone who could speak on that. Was a shocker then, but no surprise now.
Most macOS teams have unit testing. The quality of which varies greatly.
This happened to me and I finally ditched time machine for BorgBackup https://www.borgbackup.org/
Not as nice UI-wise, but at least it's stable
Vorta is a pretty nice GUI for borg on mac. Not as simple as Time Machine, but easier than creating launchctl entries.
https://vorta.borgbase.com
Apple has always had problems with SMB since they switched from one of the open-source implementations to one it internally developed, many yaers ago.
Then again, SMB especially in its newer versions seems to be a protocol developed by MS with one of its goals being to make third-party implementations as difficult as possible.
As someone from Tahoe, it makes me sad that the release with the worst reputation is named after my home region.
I still don't understand why people insist on spending good money on a closed, proprietary appliance when they can run a general purpose, flexible server such as running Samba and NFS that can be tweaked to solve a variety of edge-cases that no closed system can match.
time > money
I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe. Seems to work fine with no local configuration changes. Just make sure in SMB global configuration you:
- Enable Apple SMB2/3 Protocol Extensions
And when creating the SMB share select Time Machine for purpose.
- they blew 2 of my hard drives so far. you keep it connected and it used to do hourly backups except now both my hard drives are dead
- i am too afraid to buy another one and connect only to find out the SSD gets killed in another week
- Anyone knows about this issue?
you're probably backing up things that change very often you don't care about? Figure out what's taking up space in each backup and use `tmutil excludepath -p <dir>`.
i excluded a whole bunch of things, i did not run out of space. my SSD actually blew up. it has become unusable, i cant even open it anymore
Damn... my only guess: time machine backups are VERY write heavy. Is it a reputable brand of SSD? Is time machine frequently erasing old backups? Many external portable SSDs that work fine for regular consumer uses, might struggle to handle the write volume of time machine backups. I've used 2 external SSDs with time machine and never had them fail. (T7 Samsung SSDs)
Also you'd want the SSDs to be much larger than what you need to backup. If they're small, then time machine will have to erase the older backups to make new backups, which just leads to more rewrites, stressing the SSD more. The ones I used were 4TB, but a clean first backup of my system was only like 250GB (because many things excluded). And then daily incremental backups are like 1-3GB.
I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS — just mentioned it in an article today as “works great, until it inevitably and catastrophically fails”.
Reliable for me is Kopia from Mac to S3 compatible volume (minio) on Synology.
The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem in the first place?
I would try to do some restores of random files. Kind of a "canary in the coal mine" test. If you have problems with restoring some files or folders, then you'll have a problem with doing larger restores.
I agree - I am running my own Samba server and I don't think I'm affected, but it isn't really clear to me how to double check or why Apple's new default broke things in the first place
You could create a timestamp file on your Mac, where your Mac adds a timestamp per day or hour and have a script check that the timestamps appear in your backup.
Hi! OP here. In my case Time Machine stopped doing backups to the server, period, and would keep silently refusing to do so. I encourage you to check backups are happening.
Thanks - I can see why you skipped writing this, backups not happening at all is obviously a failure :). At least if you ever look there ...
On Tahoe my Time Machine was broken after the update. My backup target is on a QNAP NAS. I just had to set it up from scratch again and it worked. But it did cost me a few files I was trying to recover. So I feel this.
restic and kopia should work decently, if with a bit of setup, I think both can just mount backup as FUSE filesystem
The backup system that silently breaks when it doesn't like something in backend is not worth time
I did indeed switch to restic for everyday backup. Here I wrote about how to set it up so it has full disk access, uses TochID to access the secret and runs daily: https://github.com/patte/restic-macos-app
restic has the best documentation I’ve ever seen. And their developers are a joy to interact with.
Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine.
Look, face it, Time Machine is not really what Apple wants you to do. They want you to buy cloud storage and just store your documents (desktop and documents in iCloud Drive) there. Photos are in the photos app. Etc.
Maybe they should make a Time Machine cloud service to help them justify putting time into it just like iOS has cloud backups, which work incredibly smoothly. But it’s also possible macOS has too much baggage for that to work (then again, migration assistant also seems to work great.
Long story short, if you want this you probably should be working with a third party, something like tossing $5 a month at backblaze backup.
I’ve moved away from Mac and I’ve been having a great user experience with Pika backup, although it’s not quite analogous to Time Machine. Still, my Linux distribution is immutable, so backing up my home directory is pretty much the whole thing.
If you care about your data, don't trust a backup system that already failed before. This is simpler and easy to verify:
https://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html
You can also get any AI tool create a good backup script for your particular setup.
Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading to macOS Tahoe.
I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.
The last straw is that Finder's scroll bars are broken in Tahoe. I put up with it until I hit an emergency at work and was working as fast as I could (each minute mattered), Tahoe was slowing me down. Tahoe didn't pass the pressure test.
> I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.
Yeah, this is most I’ve regretted updating macOS in a decade. Apple Music in Tahoe is no longer capable of playing LAN-shared music without bugging out, which is a real bummer for my normal workflow of listening to music all day while I work.
Avoid it as long as possible. Mail search is broken 4 out of 5 days that I attempt a search, and I need to go to the webmail versions of my accounts to find anything. Fortunately it's only something I need to do about once a day, unlike in prior lives, but holy crap they took the best ruing about macOS and kids destroyed jt completely.
Plasma on Linux is looking pretty tempting these days, especially with almost all office software being web based these days.
Switching email clients is a big lift that I need to investigate, and have been hesitant to jump into until absolutely necessary, but another week of this BS...
Geary or Thunderbird are excellent mail clients.
On Linux we get this for free with Btrfs copy on write snapshots, snapper, and Btrfs Assistant.
What good is a backup if you're not checking it for months on end?
It's like they don't even care anymore
It reliably kernel panics since tahoe at a certain point
Somewhat related but I was disappointed to learn that Time Machine would no longer support Time Capsule post Tahoe, which I suppose is fair 8 years post discontinuation, but also unfortunate considering AFAICT the only real potential issue would be HDD degradation over the years? At the least, there have been plenty of system alerts noting this fact, but still annoying to have to buy something else. I know both AirPort and Time Capsule were an infinitesimally small part of their business...but they absolutely rocked when they were launched.
Apple software sucks nowadays
It sucks but everything else sucks more.
I upgraded to Asahi from Sequoia.
I have the same setup and it works fine on my machine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apple has broken Time Machine enough times that I would never consider using it at all anymore. Once upon a time, it was really neat, had great integration with Mac OS X, and an amazing user interface and experience, but it's now clearly technology that Apple will probably eventually drop entirely in favor of something less impressive all together, like telling you to buy more iCloud Storage.
Hasn't the issues always been related to remote Time Machine? I have a usb drive I use and haven't heard of any issues with that setup. Am I missing something?
In the past, I've heard recommendations not to use remote Time Machine over SMB directly, but rather to create an APFS disk image on a remote server and then backup to that as if its an external hard drive.
Supposedly, doing that eliminates a lot of the flakiness specific to SMB Time Machine, and while I haven't tested it personally, I have used disk images over SMB on macOS Tahoe recently, and they actually work great (other than the normal underlying annoyances of SMB that everyone with a NAS is mostly used to at this point).
The new ASIF format for disk images added in Tahoe actually works very well for this sort of thing, and gives you the benefits of sparse bundle disk images without requiring specific support for them on the underlying file system.[1][2] As long as you're on a file system that supports sparse files (I think pretty much every currently used file system except FAT32, exFAT, and very old implementations of HFS+), you get almost native performance out of the disk image now. (Although, again, that's just fixing the disk image overhead, you still have to work around the usual SMB weirdness unless you can get another remote file system protocol working.)
[1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/12/macos-tahoe-brings-a-new...
[2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/17/should-you-use-tahoes-ne...
SMB on macOS is and always has, and probably will always be utter shit.
Mount something over NFS< and you'll be relieved about how snappy things remain. Snappy relatively of course.
Yes, there's some bug in the backupd that panic.. no matter smb/nfs
I tried moving to NFS, but the level of complexity of NFS auth is just comical. I gave up after trying to set up a Kerberos server on the Synology that I was trying to access. It's too much.
Using unauthenticated NFS, even on a local network, is too dodgy imo.
I lose my Time Machine drive, like, every year or two.
Sometimes, Time Machine just goes stupid and I have to wipe the drive and start over. All of my efforts in the past to copy or repair or do anything to a Time Machine drive has ended in folly, so when it starts acting up, I just wipe it and start anew.
Other times, it's the drive itself, and I swap it out.
99% of the time, it Just Works. Wiping the drive for me is more annoying than catastrophic (99.9999% of the time I don't care about my 18 month old data). It's mostly for local catastrophic fat fingering on my part, and to make sure I have a solid back up after I do a OS update. I have BackBlaze for "Why is there 5 feet mud in my burning house" scenarios.
Outside of that, I've always been able to recover from it.
My wife has a SSD drive she plugs into her laptop for TM backup. That machine at most makes laps around the house, so its not that big of a deal for her.
Replication isn't a backup. You need to make periodic copies of the sparse bundle / directory to actually have a backup.
Apple customers pay for backup solutions to backup data they don't care about and they don't even care when it fails.
The bar is so low!
Yes, the most important thing for apple’s customers is that they are able to pay apple.
I use remote time machine as seem to be fine.
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