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.
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.
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.
pier25
macOS yearly updates haven't been great since they started but Tahoe is a new low.
Apple really needs to turn things around.
chmaynard
Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading to macOS Tahoe.
epistasis
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...
andrewmcwatters
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.
unsnap_biceps
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?
hedgehog
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.
roadbuster
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.
hughw
Is that 5% number real or your estimate?
H8crilA
The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem in the first place?
tonyedgecombe
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.
btreesOfSpring
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.
hughw
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.
maxkfranz
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.
codeulike
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.
tlb
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.
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.
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.
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.
pier25
macOS yearly updates haven't been great since they started but Tahoe is a new low.
Apple really needs to turn things around.
chmaynard
Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading to macOS Tahoe.
epistasis
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...
andrewmcwatters
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.
unsnap_biceps
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?
hedgehog
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.
roadbuster
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.
hughw
Is that 5% number real or your estimate?
H8crilA
The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem in the first place?
tonyedgecombe
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.
btreesOfSpring
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.
hughw
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.
maxkfranz
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.
codeulike
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.
tlb
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
macOS yearly updates haven't been great since they started but Tahoe is a new low.
Apple really needs to turn things around.
Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading to macOS Tahoe.
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...
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?
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.
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.
Is that 5% number real or your estimate?
The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem in the first place?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
macOS yearly updates haven't been great since they started but Tahoe is a new low.
Apple really needs to turn things around.
Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading to macOS Tahoe.
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...
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?
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.
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.
Is that 5% number real or your estimate?
The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem in the first place?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.