alt Hacker NewsNext: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
Replies
I don’t think they’re going to drop support for local backups any time soon. There are lots of enterprise customers relying on Time Machine who will never switch to iCloud. TM can also be configured via MDM settings and is a really common solution for Mac IT administrators, so it would take ages to deprecate it.
They switched the default protocol from AFP to SMB a long time ago.
They aren’t deprecating Time Machine. The old protocol is being removed.
The old protocol hasn’t worked well for a long time, at least in my experience
People have been asking for iCloud macOS backups since iCloud was introduced. It would be very popular. I'm not sure why Apple doesn't offer this, because it's easy revenue.
I would have agreed if they hadn't put in the engineering effort to upgrade the backup disk image to APFS instead of HFS+. They wouldn't have done that if the plan was to deprecate it soon. (IIRC the next version of macOS is also dropping HFS+ support)
Also it's honestly really weird that they don't have iCloud backups for Macs yet. It seems like a no-brainer feature. I know I would easily switch to Apple over Backblaze as Backblaze's client is just terrible.
As long as you can migrate/recover your Mac from your TM backup, I guess that this scenario won't happen.
I like having control over my backups.
I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.
Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...
The story of TimeMachine is a tragedy: a revolutionary feature that made backups accessible for normal people allowed to lie fallow for a decade or more until it's as annoying and unreliable as anything else. I now use Carbon Copy Cloner to avoid the TM headaches.
> Next: macOS iCloud backups and the eventual deprecation of local Time Machine backups altogether. More services revenue!
The "new computer" out of box account creation and first sign in experience on both Windows 11 and MacOS are clearly designed to drive end users towards perpetual for life monthly recurring subscriptions for (Microsoft 365 Personal, OneDrive, iCloud storage, etc).
Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
Changing out the network protocol used for local network backups isn't the same thing as getting rid of local network backups.
TFA:
> Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago, and has repeatedly told us that support for its predecessor AFP will be removed in the future.