[ndegruchy]

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.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[ndegruchy]

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.

[roadbuster]

> 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."

[tapete1]

This is true. If the user was capable of testing his backups, he would not be using a Mac in the first place.

[PunchyHamster]

> 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

[ndegruchy]

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.

[rcarmo]

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.

[fmajid]

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.

[gghffguhvc]

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.

[MBCook]

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.

[ndegruchy]

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.

[ndegruchy]

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/