A brief history of Time Machine (2024)

As a recent Linux to MacOS convert, I have been eyeing Time Machine as a simple backup solution. From reading the comments here it sounds like this is a far-fetched idealistic goal which is disappointing.

This seems to have not always been the case so where did things go wrong with Time Machine? Was there a particular MacOS release that broke everything?

Also what is really the gold standard in terms of backups? On Linux land I never had a great system. All I did was manually copy my drive every 6 months to a few external disks using clonezilla and gparted. This was tedious and not very user friendly.

Recently I learned of ZFS with its CoW approach and support for snapshots & it has piqued my interest. However while it may be a strictly superior way of doing backups its still not very user friendly. I have to budget time to learn it, set it up and of course its absolutely hopeless to expect my non-technical friends/family to figure it out.

Ultimately I'm seeking a tool that has good enough UI / UX that even my non-technical friends & family can use but supports incremental backups / snapshots along with detecting + auto correcting data corruption issues.

Does such a thing exist? Who are the big contenders in this space?

There is no other software I have used where the attractive design contrasts so starkly with the broken functionality.

I've used Time Machine for years with a cheap HD hanging off an old Airport Extreme, until today, incidentally.

MacOS had started warning that this approach won't be supported in the future. After upgrading to Tahoe, Time Machine kept saying backup failed, no matter what I did, despite the fact it should still work. Oh well, I'll just delete the old backup and create a new one.

I delete the old backup, click "Add Backup Disk...", select the backup disk, and get blocked with "[Drive] can only be used if it contains existing Time Machine backups for this Mac." It did! You broke them!

UGH.

I thought I'd get another year out of it. Apple in their wisdom has decided otherwise. Now I have no historical or ongoing backups.

Any recs on what to use instead?

And yet, despite all it's bells and whistles, it hasn't kept up with the times.

Apple introduced "icloud optimized storage" about a decade ago, and Time Machine still doesn't support backing up files that have been offloaded to iCloud.

While you can trigger a file download of files from iCloud, the design of Photos, where it replaces originals with "space optimized versions" means only Apple Photos can download original photos, and Time Machine will just backup a bunch of useless preview files.

i REALLY wish Apple would implement a way in MacOS to download and backup ALL iCloud content, especially given that Apples own recommendations are a bunch of manual steps : https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306

I wonder if they have considered Time Machine as a kind of private Dropbox, such that some directories are shares between machines, perhaps even remotely. I haven’t owned a Time Machine for at least a decade, but I might be tempted back by something like that.

i stopped counting how often Time Machine randomly stopped working on my wifes Macbook to our NAS. What a garbage software.

Version 1 of Time Machine was great, you could travel to the past and see how your documents looked like! Too bad that they never released version 2. Would have been great to be able to travel into the future and see how your documents would look like.