{"slug": "time-machine", "name": "Time Machine", "category": "files", "category_name": "Files, sync and backup", "description": "Apple's built-in macOS backup utility for incremental backups to external drives or network storage.", "recommenders": 7, "commenters": 18, "warners": 6, "score": 2.133, "rising": -0.96, "first": "2025-11-10", "latest": "2026-10-27", "why": "HN commenters like Time Machine for low-effort Mac backups and for restoring a whole machine onto a new Mac.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 7, "neutral": 6, "compare": 0, "warn": 6}, "spark": [2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": ["Full restores", "Easy setup"], "caveat": "Silent failure", "short_quote": "Time Machine has been rock solid for ten years for my wife", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "", "pricing": "free", "aliases": ["Time Machine"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters like Time Machine for low-effort Mac backups", "cites": [{"id": 804244544, "item_id": 50265284, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50265284", "by": "samatman", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Have a Time Machine. No step two.", "excerpt": "This is a not-very-large subset of the ways you can permanently lose data which exists in only one copy. Have a Time Machine. No step two. > We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage. Cool. How are you backing it up?", "context": "", "use_case": "backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "New 14\u2011inch MacBook Pro with M6"}, {"id": 782630818, "item_id": 48914426, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914426", "by": "jherskovic", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over.", "excerpt": "Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend\u2019s NAS in a different city. And his to mine. My wife\u2019s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would. TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Ma", "context": "", "use_case": "local backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft deleted my account and OneDrive"}, {"id": 734020992, "item_id": 45876312, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876312", "by": "JSR_FDED", "date": "2025-11-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine has been rock solid for ten years for my wife", "excerpt": "Time Machine has been rock solid for ten years for my wife, who is an ordinary user. I use SuperDuper which has also been solid for even longer.", "context": "", "use_case": "backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "A brief history of Time Machine (2024)"}]}, {"text": " and for restoring a whole machine onto a new Mac.", "cites": [{"id": 764277617, "item_id": 47767351, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767351", "by": "nodesocket", "date": "2026-04-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine.", "excerpt": "I use Backblaze to backup my gaming PC. While .git and Dropbox does not affect me it\u2019s worrisome that OneDrive is not backed up seeing as Windows 11 somehow automatically/dark pattern stores local files in OneDrive. You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine. I have fully restored from Time Machine backups when buying new Macs more times than I can count. It works and everything comes back to an identica", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backup and restore", "switched_from": "", "story": "Backblaze has stopped backing up your data"}, {"id": 734063824, "item_id": 45878989, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45878989", "by": "ubermonkey", "date": "2025-11-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine saved me.", "excerpt": "The only time I ever needed catastrophic backup recovery -- thanks to a robbery a dozen years ago -- Time Machine saved me. I bought a new Mac, plugged in the TM drive, told it to migrate, and stepped out for lunch. When I came back, even my browser windows were restored. I was pretty impressed. I continue to keep a TM running on both my primary machine and my \"media server\" laptop. Because I'm an old nerd and I have", "context": "old nerd with a multi-layer backup regime", "use_case": "Mac backup and migration", "switched_from": "", "story": "A brief history of Time Machine (2024)"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is that backups can silently corrupt or fail catastrophically, especially to a NAS,", "cites": [{"id": 797744848, "item_id": 49859053, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859053", "by": "setopt", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted", "excerpt": "Good examples. When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine \u2013 at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that\u2019s what I use on Linux.) Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ s", "context": "switched to Mac around 2020", "use_case": "macOS backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy"}, {"id": 749645936, "item_id": 46852871, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46852871", "by": "re5i5tor", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS", "excerpt": "I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS \u2014 just mentioned it in an article today as \u201cworks great, until it inevitably and catastrophically fails\u201d. Reliable for me is Kopia from Mac to S3 compatible volume (minio) on Synology.", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 749587105, "item_id": 46849194, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849194", "by": "hughw", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It's so fragile you can't rely on it.", "excerpt": "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 existin", "context": "", "use_case": "hourly backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 782630818, "item_id": 48914426, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914426", "by": "jherskovic", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over.", "excerpt": "Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend\u2019s NAS in a different city. And his to mine. My wife\u2019s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would. TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Ma", "context": "", "use_case": "local backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft deleted my account and OneDrive"}]}, {"text": " so many pair it with a second backup tool.", "cites": [{"id": 787551458, "item_id": 49221966, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49221966", "by": "Syzygies", "date": "2026-08-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine.", "excerpt": "Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine. One should evaluate SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner side by side, and make a choice. Buy them both, or use both trials. They both have decades of experience providing astounding support. I should know as an edge case that has tried to rip the wings off of both their programs (trying to migrate away from disastrous RAID software and ending up with duplicate UUID", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "SupererDuperer"}, {"id": 749587105, "item_id": 46849194, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849194", "by": "hughw", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It's so fragile you can't rely on it.", "excerpt": "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 existin", "context": "", "use_case": "hourly backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 737707984, "item_id": 46106749, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106749", "by": "stavarotti", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Time Machine and Backblaze", "excerpt": "An underrated and oft understated rule is always have backups, and if you're paranoid enough, backups of backups (I use Time Machine and Backblaze). There should be absolutely no reason why deleting files should be a catastrophic issue for anyone in this space. Perhaps you lose a couple of hours restoring files, but the response to that should be \"Let me try a different approach\". Yes, it's caveat emptor and all, but", "context": "", "use_case": "backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive"}, {"id": 789675329, "item_id": 49354708, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354708", "by": "noduerme", "date": "2026-08-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "along with Time Machine to an external SSD", "excerpt": "Fair enough, I guess if you want access to your entire lifetime photo collection through your phone that makes sense. As far as backups - I mean, that's just a general question of keeping your laptop backed up. I use Arq (highly recommended!) to maintain a remote encrypted backup on a VPS, along with Time Machine to an external SSD.", "context": "", "use_case": "local backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Full restores", "summary": "Commenters report restoring entire Macs to an identical state, including when migrating to new hardware.", "quotes": [{"id": 764277617, "item_id": 47767351, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767351", "by": "nodesocket", "date": "2026-04-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine.", "excerpt": "I use Backblaze to backup my gaming PC. While .git and Dropbox does not affect me it\u2019s worrisome that OneDrive is not backed up seeing as Windows 11 somehow automatically/dark pattern stores local files in OneDrive. You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine. I have fully restored from Time Machine backups when buying new Macs more times than I can count. It works and everything comes back to an identica", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backup and restore", "switched_from": "", "story": "Backblaze has stopped backing up your data"}, {"id": 734063824, "item_id": 45878989, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45878989", "by": "ubermonkey", "date": "2025-11-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine saved me.", "excerpt": "The only time I ever needed catastrophic backup recovery -- thanks to a robbery a dozen years ago -- Time Machine saved me. I bought a new Mac, plugged in the TM drive, told it to migrate, and stepped out for lunch. When I came back, even my browser windows were restored. I was pretty impressed. I continue to keep a TM running on both my primary machine and my \"media server\" laptop. Because I'm an old nerd and I have", "context": "old nerd with a multi-layer backup regime", "use_case": "Mac backup and migration", "switched_from": "", "story": "A brief history of Time Machine (2024)"}, {"id": 749580768, "item_id": 46848798, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848798", "by": "ndegruchy", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "", "use_case": "backups to Synology over SMB", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}]}, {"label": "Easy setup", "summary": "Commenters describe backing up as trivial, with no further steps needed.", "quotes": [{"id": 804244544, "item_id": 50265284, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50265284", "by": "samatman", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Have a Time Machine. No step two.", "excerpt": "This is a not-very-large subset of the ways you can permanently lose data which exists in only one copy. Have a Time Machine. No step two. > We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage. Cool. How are you backing it up?", "context": "", "use_case": "backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "New 14\u2011inch MacBook Pro with M6"}, {"id": 782630818, "item_id": 48914426, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914426", "by": "jherskovic", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over.", "excerpt": "Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend\u2019s NAS in a different city. And his to mine. My wife\u2019s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would. TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Ma", "context": "", "use_case": "local backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft deleted my account and OneDrive"}]}, {"label": "Long-term reliability", "summary": "Some report years of trouble-free use, including for non-technical users.", "quotes": [{"id": 734020992, "item_id": 45876312, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876312", "by": "JSR_FDED", "date": "2025-11-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine has been rock solid for ten years for my wife", "excerpt": "Time Machine has been rock solid for ten years for my wife, who is an ordinary user. I use SuperDuper which has also been solid for even longer.", "context": "", "use_case": "backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "A brief history of Time Machine (2024)"}, {"id": 764277617, "item_id": 47767351, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767351", "by": "nodesocket", "date": "2026-04-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine.", "excerpt": "I use Backblaze to backup my gaming PC. While .git and Dropbox does not affect me it\u2019s worrisome that OneDrive is not backed up seeing as Windows 11 somehow automatically/dark pattern stores local files in OneDrive. You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine. I have fully restored from Time Machine backups when buying new Macs more times than I can count. It works and everything comes back to an identica", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backup and restore", "switched_from": "", "story": "Backblaze has stopped backing up your data"}]}, {"label": "NAS destinations", "summary": "Some use TrueNAS or Synology as a Time Machine target without problems.", "quotes": [{"id": 749611425, "item_id": 46850714, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850714", "by": "nodesocket", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe.", "excerpt": "I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe. Seems to work fine with no local configuration changes. Just make sure in SMB global configuration you: - Enable Apple SMB2/3 Protocol Extensions And when creating the SMB share select Time Machine for purpose.", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 749580768, "item_id": 46848798, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848798", "by": "ndegruchy", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "", "use_case": "backups to Synology over SMB", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 795787360, "item_id": 49736710, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49736710", "by": "mmazzarolo", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "backups then via Time Machine on a Synology NAS", "excerpt": "I have a weird setup lol. I use a shared photos library with my partner (so that we have all family photos together) and have a MacBook Air that has Photos being download in raw quality and backups then via Time Machine on a Synology NAS. Plus, Synology photo sync on my iPhone (backing up on my NAS separately from Time Machine) AND Google Photos on my partner\u2019s (syncing on Google Photos). Yes it\u2019s horrible, just neve", "context": "", "use_case": "photo library backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Backups Aren't Simple"}]}, {"label": "Layered backups", "summary": "Commenters use it as the local layer alongside cloud backups such as Backblaze or Arq.", "quotes": [{"id": 737707984, "item_id": 46106749, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106749", "by": "stavarotti", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Time Machine and Backblaze", "excerpt": "An underrated and oft understated rule is always have backups, and if you're paranoid enough, backups of backups (I use Time Machine and Backblaze). There should be absolutely no reason why deleting files should be a catastrophic issue for anyone in this space. Perhaps you lose a couple of hours restoring files, but the response to that should be \"Let me try a different approach\". Yes, it's caveat emptor and all, but", "context": "", "use_case": "backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive"}, {"id": 777387009, "item_id": 48586688, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586688", "by": "tristor", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I keep a second copy on an external SSD via Time Machine", "excerpt": "I use the 3-2-1 strategy for backups. I keep one copy off-site by using cloud backups, currently I primarily use Backblaze for that purpose but am considering alternatives for several reasons. I keep a second copy on an external SSD via Time Machine, and I keep one copy on-device. I'd like to use network Time Machine to get rid of the inconvenience of having a bunch of USB external SSDs floating around, especially si", "context": "photographer using 3-2-1 backups", "use_case": "local backup to external SSD", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS"}, {"id": 789675329, "item_id": 49354708, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354708", "by": "noduerme", "date": "2026-08-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "along with Time Machine to an external SSD", "excerpt": "Fair enough, I guess if you want access to your entire lifetime photo collection through your phone that makes sense. As far as backups - I mean, that's just a general question of keeping your laptop backed up. I use Arq (highly recommended!) to maintain a remote encrypted backup on a VPS, along with Time Machine to an external SSD.", "context": "", "use_case": "local backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Silent failure", "summary": "Users report backups being silently corrupted or wiped, forcing a restart from scratch.", "quotes": [{"id": 797744848, "item_id": 49859053, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859053", "by": "setopt", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted", "excerpt": "Good examples. When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine \u2013 at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that\u2019s what I use on Linux.) Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ s", "context": "switched to Mac around 2020", "use_case": "macOS backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy"}, {"id": 749587105, "item_id": 46849194, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849194", "by": "hughw", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It's so fragile you can't rely on it.", "excerpt": "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 existin", "context": "", "use_case": "hourly backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 782630818, "item_id": 48914426, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914426", "by": "jherskovic", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over.", "excerpt": "Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend\u2019s NAS in a different city. And his to mine. My wife\u2019s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would. TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Ma", "context": "", "use_case": "local backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft deleted my account and OneDrive"}]}, {"label": "NAS fragility", "summary": "Backing up over a network file system is called fragile and prone to catastrophic failure.", "quotes": [{"id": 749645936, "item_id": 46852871, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46852871", "by": "re5i5tor", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS", "excerpt": "I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS \u2014 just mentioned it in an article today as \u201cworks great, until it inevitably and catastrophically fails\u201d. Reliable for me is Kopia from Mac to S3 compatible volume (minio) on Synology.", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 749587105, "item_id": 46849194, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849194", "by": "hughw", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It's so fragile you can't rely on it.", "excerpt": "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 existin", "context": "", "use_case": "hourly backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}]}, {"label": "Not sole backup", "summary": "Some advise against relying on it alone and suggest SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner, Arq or Kopia instead.", "quotes": [{"id": 787551458, "item_id": 49221966, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49221966", "by": "Syzygies", "date": "2026-08-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine.", "excerpt": "Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine. One should evaluate SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner side by side, and make a choice. Buy them both, or use both trials. They both have decades of experience providing astounding support. I should know as an edge case that has tried to rip the wings off of both their programs (trying to migrate away from disastrous RAID software and ending up with duplicate UUID", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "SupererDuperer"}, {"id": 749645936, "item_id": 46852871, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46852871", "by": "re5i5tor", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS", "excerpt": "I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS \u2014 just mentioned it in an article today as \u201cworks great, until it inevitably and catastrophically fails\u201d. Reliable for me is Kopia from Mac to S3 compatible volume (minio) on Synology.", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 749587105, "item_id": 46849194, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849194", "by": "hughw", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It's so fragile you can't rely on it.", "excerpt": "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 existin", "context": "", "use_case": "hourly backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}]}, {"label": "Apple neglect", "summary": "Commenters describe buggy animations and little ongoing effort from Apple.", "quotes": [{"id": 766794512, "item_id": 47924657, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47924657", "by": "ndisn", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I use Time Machine and I\u2019m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are.", "excerpt": "On an unrelated note, I use Time Machine and I\u2019m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are. They used to look magical, but now they are a mess of elements popping on and off and things moving and then vanishing the next frame and so on. It looks like they kept changing Finder and Time Machine didn\u2019t keep up; they kept fixing the bare minimum to have it compile and nothing more.", "context": "", "use_case": "backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple is dropping AFP/TimeCapsule support in macOS 27"}, {"id": 749627088, "item_id": 46851693, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46851693", "by": "dangus", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine.", "excerpt": "Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine. Look, face it, Time Machine is not really what Apple wants you to do. They want you to buy cloud storage and just store your documents (desktop and documents in iCloud Drive) there. Photos are in the photos app. Etc. Maybe they should make a Time Machine cloud service to help them justify putting time into it just ", "context": "moved away from Mac", "use_case": "Mac backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}]}, {"label": "Drive replacement", "summary": "One commenter notes needing to replace the backup hard drive every few years.", "quotes": [{"id": 782630818, "item_id": 48914426, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914426", "by": "jherskovic", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over.", "excerpt": "Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend\u2019s NAS in a different city. And his to mine. My wife\u2019s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would. TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Ma", "context": "", "use_case": "local backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft deleted my account and OneDrive"}]}], "who": [{"by": "tristor", "context": "photographer using 3-2-1 backups", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586688", "date": "2026-06-18"}, {"by": "ubermonkey", "context": "old nerd with a multi-layer backup regime", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45878989", "date": "2025-11-10"}], "tags": ["for Mac users", "for NAS backups", "for 3-2-1 backup setups", "for non-technical users"], "use_cases": ["backups", "mac backups", "local backups", "macos backups", "photo library backup", "mac backup"], "compared": [{"slug": "backblaze", "name": "Backblaze", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "arq", "name": "Arq", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "superduper", "name": "SuperDuper", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "pika-backup", "name": "Pika Backup", "co": 1, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "kopia", "name": "Kopia", "co": 1, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "rsync", "name": "rsync", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "truenas", "name": "TrueNAS", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848699", "title": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732513", "title": "Backups Aren't Simple", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804416", "title": "A brief history of Time Machine (2024)", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261352", "title": "New 14\u2011inch MacBook Pro with M6", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842487", "title": "The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290545", "title": "How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 2}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 3, "neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 2, "warn": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804244544, "item_id": 50265284, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50265284", "by": "samatman", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Have a Time Machine. No step two.", "excerpt": "This is a not-very-large subset of the ways you can permanently lose data which exists in only one copy. Have a Time Machine. No step two. > We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage. Cool. How are you backing it up?", "context": "", "use_case": "backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "New 14\u2011inch MacBook Pro with M6"}, {"id": 797744848, "item_id": 49859053, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859053", "by": "setopt", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted", "excerpt": "Good examples. When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine \u2013 at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that\u2019s what I use on Linux.) Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ s", "context": "switched to Mac around 2020", "use_case": "macOS backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy"}, {"id": 795798609, "item_id": 49737413, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737413", "by": "unanimous", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Now I use Time Machine", "excerpt": "When I was using Ubuntu, I would plug my phone into my laptop and run this small script: https://gist.github.com/wheelercj/8cce112fc8ee55fd4858847a526ff69f It's mainly just rsync. When the phone was plugged in, the photos were accessible at a path like \"/run/user/1000/gvfs/gphoto2:host=Apple_Inc._iPhone_abc123/\". Now I use Time Machine, but I still need to check whether it includes iCloud photos.", "context": "", "use_case": "backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Backups Aren't Simple"}, {"id": 795787360, "item_id": 49736710, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49736710", "by": "mmazzarolo", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "backups then via Time Machine on a Synology NAS", "excerpt": "I have a weird setup lol. I use a shared photos library with my partner (so that we have all family photos together) and have a MacBook Air that has Photos being download in raw quality and backups then via Time Machine on a Synology NAS. Plus, Synology photo sync on my iPhone (backing up on my NAS separately from Time Machine) AND Google Photos on my partner\u2019s (syncing on Google Photos). Yes it\u2019s horrible, just neve", "context": "", "use_case": "photo library backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Backups Aren't Simple"}, {"id": 789675329, "item_id": 49354708, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354708", "by": "noduerme", "date": "2026-08-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "along with Time Machine to an external SSD", "excerpt": "Fair enough, I guess if you want access to your entire lifetime photo collection through your phone that makes sense. As far as backups - I mean, that's just a general question of keeping your laptop backed up. I use Arq (highly recommended!) to maintain a remote encrypted backup on a VPS, along with Time Machine to an external SSD.", "context": "", "use_case": "local backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?"}, {"id": 787551458, "item_id": 49221966, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49221966", "by": "Syzygies", "date": "2026-08-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine.", "excerpt": "Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine. One should evaluate SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner side by side, and make a choice. Buy them both, or use both trials. They both have decades of experience providing astounding support. I should know as an edge case that has tried to rip the wings off of both their programs (trying to migrate away from disastrous RAID software and ending up with duplicate UUID", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "SupererDuperer"}, {"id": 782630818, "item_id": 48914426, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914426", "by": "jherskovic", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over.", "excerpt": "Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend\u2019s NAS in a different city. And his to mine. My wife\u2019s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would. TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Ma", "context": "", "use_case": "local backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft deleted my account and OneDrive"}, {"id": 777387009, "item_id": 48586688, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586688", "by": "tristor", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I keep a second copy on an external SSD via Time Machine", "excerpt": "I use the 3-2-1 strategy for backups. I keep one copy off-site by using cloud backups, currently I primarily use Backblaze for that purpose but am considering alternatives for several reasons. I keep a second copy on an external SSD via Time Machine, and I keep one copy on-device. I'd like to use network Time Machine to get rid of the inconvenience of having a bunch of USB external SSDs floating around, especially si", "context": "photographer using 3-2-1 backups", "use_case": "local backup to external SSD", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS"}, {"id": 767723986, "item_id": 47982749, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982749", "by": "k310", "date": "2026-05-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "along with TimeMachine (after I move the Downloads directory with all its excess to an external disk)", "excerpt": "I turned off \"iCloud Photos\". [0] I turned off \"Optimize Mac Storage\" on the mac. [1] I back up all devices to the mac and nothing else [2] [0] I found 10 being sent to iCloud on the mac, entirely by accident. [1] Who in their right mind sends their home directory to Apple? I used to put Sun user home directories on NFS for some 300 users, because it was necessary, and I guarded them like crazy. [2] I turned off iClo", "context": "", "use_case": "computer backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple Is Holding My Pictures Hostage Until I Accept Their New Terms of Service"}, {"id": 766794512, "item_id": 47924657, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47924657", "by": "ndisn", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I use Time Machine and I\u2019m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are.", "excerpt": "On an unrelated note, I use Time Machine and I\u2019m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are. They used to look magical, but now they are a mess of elements popping on and off and things moving and then vanishing the next frame and so on. It looks like they kept changing Finder and Time Machine didn\u2019t keep up; they kept fixing the bare minimum to have it compile and nothing more.", "context": "", "use_case": "backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple is dropping AFP/TimeCapsule support in macOS 27"}, {"id": 764277617, "item_id": 47767351, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767351", "by": "nodesocket", "date": "2026-04-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine.", "excerpt": "I use Backblaze to backup my gaming PC. While .git and Dropbox does not affect me it\u2019s worrisome that OneDrive is not backed up seeing as Windows 11 somehow automatically/dark pattern stores local files in OneDrive. You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine. I have fully restored from Time Machine backups when buying new Macs more times than I can count. It works and everything comes back to an identica", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backup and restore", "switched_from": "", "story": "Backblaze has stopped backing up your data"}, {"id": 749645936, "item_id": 46852871, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46852871", "by": "re5i5tor", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS", "excerpt": "I strongly recommend against Time Machine to NAS \u2014 just mentioned it in an article today as \u201cworks great, until it inevitably and catastrophically fails\u201d. Reliable for me is Kopia from Mac to S3 compatible volume (minio) on Synology.", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 749627088, "item_id": 46851693, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46851693", "by": "dangus", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine.", "excerpt": "Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine. Look, face it, Time Machine is not really what Apple wants you to do. They want you to buy cloud storage and just store your documents (desktop and documents in iCloud Drive) there. Photos are in the photos app. Etc. Maybe they should make a Time Machine cloud service to help them justify putting time into it just ", "context": "moved away from Mac", "use_case": "Mac backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 749611425, "item_id": 46850714, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850714", "by": "nodesocket", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe.", "excerpt": "I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe. Seems to work fine with no local configuration changes. Just make sure in SMB global configuration you: - Enable Apple SMB2/3 Protocol Extensions And when creating the SMB share select Time Machine for purpose.", "context": "", "use_case": "Mac backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 749587105, "item_id": 46849194, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849194", "by": "hughw", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It's so fragile you can't rely on it.", "excerpt": "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 existin", "context": "", "use_case": "hourly backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 749580768, "item_id": 46848798, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848798", "by": "ndegruchy", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "", "use_case": "backups to Synology over SMB", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 737707984, "item_id": 46106749, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106749", "by": "stavarotti", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Time Machine and Backblaze", "excerpt": "An underrated and oft understated rule is always have backups, and if you're paranoid enough, backups of backups (I use Time Machine and Backblaze). There should be absolutely no reason why deleting files should be a catastrophic issue for anyone in this space. Perhaps you lose a couple of hours restoring files, but the response to that should be \"Let me try a different approach\". Yes, it's caveat emptor and all, but", "context": "", "use_case": "backups", "switched_from": "", "story": "Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive"}, {"id": 734063824, "item_id": 45878989, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45878989", "by": "ubermonkey", "date": "2025-11-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine saved me.", "excerpt": "The only time I ever needed catastrophic backup recovery -- thanks to a robbery a dozen years ago -- Time Machine saved me. I bought a new Mac, plugged in the TM drive, told it to migrate, and stepped out for lunch. When I came back, even my browser windows were restored. I was pretty impressed. I continue to keep a TM running on both my primary machine and my \"media server\" laptop. Because I'm an old nerd and I have", "context": "old nerd with a multi-layer backup regime", "use_case": "Mac backup and migration", "switched_from": "", "story": "A brief history of Time Machine (2024)"}, {"id": 734020992, "item_id": 45876312, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876312", "by": "JSR_FDED", "date": "2025-11-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Time Machine has been rock solid for ten years for my wife", "excerpt": "Time Machine has been rock solid for ten years for my wife, who is an ordinary user. I use SuperDuper which has also been solid for even longer.", "context": "", "use_case": "backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "A brief history of Time Machine (2024)"}]}