alt Hacker NewsIt works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD. It's not locked to Apple's ecosystem. You can back up directly to local storage, SFTP, S3, Backblaze B2, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. Time Machine is largely limited to local drives or network shares. Restic deduplicates at the chunk level across all snapshots, often achieving better space efficiency than Time Machine's hardlink-based approach. All data is encrypted client-side before leaving your machine. Time Machine encryption is optional. Restic supports append-only mode for protection against ransomware or accidental deletion. It also has a built-in check command to check integrity.
Time Machine has a reputation for silent failures and corruption issues that have frustrated users for years. Network backups (to NAS devices) use sparse bundle disk images that are notoriously fragile. A dropped connection mid-backup can corrupt the entire backup history, not just the current snapshot. https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+corruption+spar...
Time Machine sometimes decides a backup is corrupted and demands you start fresh, losing all history. Backups can stop working without obvious notification, leaving users thinking they're protected when they're not. https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/11cod08/apple_tim...
The shift from HFS+ to APFS introduced new bugs, and local snapshots sometimes behave unpredictably. https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+restore+problem...
The backup metadata database can grow unwieldy and slow, eventually causing failures.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1cjebor/why_is_time_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/w7mkk9/time_machine_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1du5nc6/time_machine...
https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/omk7z7/is_a_time_machi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/ydfman/time_machine_ba...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1pfmiww/time_machine...
https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/lci6z0/time_machine_ex...
Time Machine is just garbage for ignorant people.
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But I just want to backup my important files to the cloud
Almost all of my backup is around restic, including monitoring of backups (when they fail and when they do not run often enough).
It is a very solid setup, with 3 independent backups: local, nearby and far away.
Now - it took an awful lot of time to set up (including drinking the wrapper to account for everything). This is advanced IT level.
So Time Machine is not for ignorant people, but something everyone can use. (I never used it, no idea if it's good but it has to all last work)