A brief history of Time Machine (2024)

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?

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

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.