Bombich Software Blog

> I've been generally happy with Time Machine's stability, but this is getting me a little worried.

For the longest time, I backed up my MacBooks with Time Machine to a NAS.

Seemed to work fine - Time Machine was successful and I was able to browse previous versions on the machine being backed up without an issue (browse history of machine A on machine A).

Then one day I was planning to wipe a MacBook and do a clean install - figured I'd confirm I could browse my backups made on machine A on machine B before I wiped A. I spent over an hour attempting to open the sparse bundle (w/ Time Machine and manually) and just couldn't do it - kept loading forever or giving me errors about volume verification among other things[0].

> I guess now's a good time to looking into Arq (or similar)

Like you, I decided to take a look at alternatives. I'd previously played around with Arq (v5) and it looked awesome - stable, well-documented, etc. Well, by the time I actually needed an alternative to Time Machine, Arq had released v6 - earlier this year[1].

Unfortunately it appeared to be bug-prone (not great for backups!) and lacked ANY documentation (one of the great things about v5 was the in-depth documentation, particularly around backup format). Users on the subreddit[2] weren't thrilled and you can't purchase v5 licenses (and TBH I wouldn't recommend purchasing software that isn't supported anymore).

Within the last week or two, Arq has released a second major version within a year…

> Time Machine Silently Excludes Critical Data

Sorry, but you simply didn't read the docs when setting up backup of your critical data. It's explicit that Time Machine does not back up removable drives. Try: http://www.bombich.com/

EDIT: Apparently, this runs deeper. Time Machine mistakenly marks his internal drives as removables. However, he also states that he's done lots of system modding and that he has 10 internal drives. I don't think he's the target user TM was designed for. I'm not either. I have also had some TM problems and now use CCC as my primary backup, with TM as a convenience and secondary backup.

> Finder Refuses to Delete 'Backup Items'

Author states he uses OS X for serious work, and implies he has the technical wherewithal to evaluate OS X's stability and coding excellence. Apparently, he's not a programmer, or not one competent enough to use lsof and kill.

> Bottom line: Fusion as-is and as supplied by Apple is OK (maybe, hard to say for sure in multi-drive systems). Other than that, messing around carries some ugly risks.

Sorry, but if you mod your setup, then you should look in the mirror when you complain. For what you want to do there, you should be using diskutil corestorage on the command line. However, the diskutil GUI doesn't tell end users everything about corestorage yet, and I agree that this is bad. It contravenes expectations established by Disk Utility and OS X in the past -- without sufficiently warning users.

In no particular order:

Prologue [0] - iOS Audiobook player, used Plex as a media source

Overcast [1] - iOS Podcast player

CleanShotX [2] - macOS screenshot/video/gif capture with annotation

Drafts [3] - iOS/macOS note taking tool

Paprika [4] - Cross platform recipe app

YNAB [5] - "You Need A Budget" - web/mobile budgeting app

1Password [6] - Cross platform password manager

Carrot Weather [7] - iOS weather app

Color Slurp [8] - macOS color picker tool

Phoenix [9] - macOS scriptable window manager

Alfred [10] - macOS app launcher

Bartender [11] - macOS menu bar organizer

Coderunner [12] - macOS tool to run snippets of code in a number of supported languages. Great for testing something quickly

DaisyDisk [13] - macOS disk space analyzer

iTerm 2 [14] - Rock solid macOS terminal

JetBrains IDEs [15] - Cross platform suite of IDEs

Rocket [16] - macOS emoji quick substitution tool

Transmit [17] - macOS SFTP/FTP/S3/etc tool

VLC [18] - Cross platform video player

CarbonCopyCloner [19] - macOS disk cloning/backup tool

Pixelmator Pro [20] - macOS photo editor

Preview [21] - Built-in macOS image/pdf viewer

QuickLook [22] - Built-in macOS file preview tool

[0] https://prologue.audio/

[1] https://overcast.fm/

[2] https://cleanshot.com/

[3] https://getdrafts.com/

[4] https://www.paprikaapp.com/

[5] https://www.youneedabudget.com/

[6] https://1password.com/

[7] https://www.meetcarrot.com/weather/

[8] https://colorslurp.com/

[9]…

> Without Apple, instead of creating an app you would have to create an app and the platform and distribution mechanism etc.

And? As Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire et al observed:

> We started selling over the web in the mid ’90s.

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/robpegoraro/2020/07/29/what-tim-cook-left-out-of-his-version-of-app-store-history/

He says they'd give up 5% to a payment processor, not 30%. John Gruber:

> To omit the fact that there was — dating back to the mid-’90s, well over a decade before the iPhone App Store — a thriving market for software sold directly over a thing called “The Internet” is sophistry. Most Mac software is still sold and distributed this way today. If App Stores are so great why is most Mac software sold outside the Mac App Store?

* https://daringfireball.net/2020/07/parsing_cooks_opening_statement

And you don't have to build it yourself, as there is now SaaS for all of this, and I'd hazard to guess that they'd be less that 30%. For example the Carbon Copy Cloner folks redirect to a third-party:

* https://bombich.com/store

And even if they took 30%, you'd still have the freedom to write apps the way you want and not be beholden to Apple's guidelines.

Since I am also an avid DSLR photographer, the first decision I made was to use Adobe Lightroom (Classic) as the "single source of truth" to manage all our photos.

This means obviously importing all photos taken via my DSLR into Lightroom, but also syncing all photos taken on our iPhones via the Lightroom Mobile App.

Lightroom Classic keeps all the (compressed) photos in the Adobe cloud for easy sharing and browsing, but also writes them out (unaltered) to a directory on my Local NAS.

This NAS gets automatically backed up via Arq Backup (https://www.arqbackup.com) to an encrypted Amazon S3 bucket. Additionally, once or twice a year I create a versioned copy of the NAS via Carbon Copy Cloner (https://bombich.com/) to an external hard drive. This hard drive is stored offsite somewhere safe.

In a nutshell, for around $12 a month + a NAS + a hard drive, we have all the convenience of the Adobe Lightroom cloud combined with a local copy on the NAS, a cloud copy on S3 (in case Lightroom cloud gets corrupted) and an offsite copy (in case our place and the whole internet burns down :-)).

Arq has an option to backup to a local drive. This should suffice your local backup needs. They have both Windows and Mac App.

I live in India and I realized about a year back that both Backblaze and Crashplan sucks on recovery. They don't seem to have servers nearby nor the option to mail a disk quickly enough. Here is how I do my current backup setup.

Time Machine as the default option that keeps chugging along.

Carbon Copy Cloner[1] mirrors my primary computer's drive (bootable). This is scheduled to backup every day around 11:00 PM.

Arq[2] does a backup to Amazon Drive every 5 minutes but is asked to pause between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM. I'm looking for economical alternatives[3] to Amazon Drive, as they are terminating the unlimited option.

1. https://bombich.com/

2. https://www.arqbackup.com/

3. https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/pages/strategy.html