Fossil is great. Not only is it a full suite of tools associated with the repository (discussions, tickets, wiki) but the tool is a single >10mb binary and can run as a web server (or CGI-like interface) for remote hosting.

The web server that powers fossil was also written by its author! It’s nice that unlike git instaweb you don’t need to install an additional web server just to see a read only view of your commits.

Absolutely. Handy for making diagrams or just doodling and making custom headers for config files with `fig` and some boxes and shadows!

I would try to do some restores of random files. Kind of a "canary in the coal mine" test. If you have problems with restoring some files or folders, then you'll have a problem with doing larger restores.

This has been on my to-buy list for a while. Something I should probably do, because while recovery from the built-in recovery interface is fine, having an offline bootable backup is also great. It also doesn't interfere with having Time Machine be the "standard" backup.

I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.

>This has been on my to-buy list for a while.

While I agree that SuperDuper! is worth buying, it is free to use for whole-disk backup/cloning. The paid version enables smart copying (that is, only copying files changed since the last backup).

You can just use the UI to make whatever schedule you want (monthly, daily, every Monday, etc.). I think it edits your crontab behind the scenes. I set it to daily, but you could set whatever you want. You can even have multiple schedule entries, similar to cron.

Edit: Yeah, the bootable backups have saved me more than once. It's great to just be able to keep working even when the system disk is kaput.

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.

> but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.

For a professional devops person managing a custom backup solution, I agree.

For someone using mainstream consumer technology on a consumer laptop, it's not realistic to expect this. It needs to just work.

I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology.

However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them.

Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can check on your backups. Even if it's just a quick test of a restored file or folders.

> Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network

I don’t understand why people think this is complicated or limited only to highly technical people.

NAS units are popular with consumers now, not just tech people. They buy them with drives installed and they come with instructions to set up backups with Windows and Mac.

I get what you're saying. I will only quibble that the consumers in the market for a NAS, regardless of ease-of-setup, is still bordering technically inclined. My mother-in-law has enough trouble with her iPhone, let alone a server-type-device that she needs to administer.

I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.

My impression is that companies like Backblaze and other backup-as-a-service solutions are more consumer-popular because it externalizes the complexity and pitfalls like the author is experiencing.

> I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.

The problem is that the typical consumer with a laptop never uses it in a docked configuration and just plugs it in to charge.

You may as well tell someone they need to regularly plug a USB hard drive into their iphone to back up their photos.

> For someone using consumer technology on a consumer laptop

Mounting an SMB share on a Synology NAS to use as a Time Machine backup target is not what most users would consider "consumer technology."

To the contrary. Time Machine is for consumers. Most people use it either with an external hard drive (good for iMacs that stay in one place) or a NAS (good for MacBooks). Apple even sold the AirPort Time Capsule at one point. Since that was discontinued, Synology NAS is the main consumer-friendly alternative. It comes with dedicated Time Machine support. It's supposed to be easy setup and forget. That's the whole point of using Synology instead of alternatives that require more technical expertise, that aren't designed for Time Machine support straight out of the box.

I wasn't even assigning blame, did you mean to reply to someone else?

I was just replying to your point that a Synology NAS "is not what most users would consider 'consumer technology.'" It's firmly in the consumer technology category.

That’s definitely in the range of what consumers do these days.

The consumer NAS business is large. These are popular items with average consumers who understand the importance of backups.

It’s reasonable to expect it to work properly.

> 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.

Regardless he should've gotten alert if backup target is unusable, not silently break

100%

My biggest gripes with Time Machine are the lack of visibility, the silent failures and the inflexible scheduling. I know there are methods to work around the last one, but the first two are paramount. It does do consistency checking, at least as far as the logs say, but it says nothing about the health of the backup container.

While most users don't really want to know about this stuff, I feel like it's important enough to have a more comprehensive UI to provide some insight into the feature and the associated health.

Hi! OP here. No, that was not it. Time Machine just quietly failed to do any backups and I failed to notice they weren't happening.

I use a self-hosted healthchecks.io watchdog timer instance to monitor jobs like these and alert if they don’t complete. Of course TimeMachine doesn’t have a way to signal successful completion, unlike, say, Carbon Copy Cloner. Given Apple software quality’s accelerating downward trend, I’d suggest switching to rsync/rclone instead, or Borg/Kopia if you want GUI-driven restores for non-technical members of your family.

It’s long past time you flipped the bozo switch on Apple, the title of your blog notwithstanding.

I am using Borg Backup on Fedora, so that’s coming.

Yes, just saw your post on Vorta. I myself am ditching Apple platforms due to creeping enshittification, but I doubt my wife will.

Time Machine is for the everyday person. The everyday person doesn’t have a few thousand dollars to buy a second machine just to properly test a full restore backup periodically.

They don’t cost that much. And there are cheaper options.

Most computers Apple sells are laptops. By a huge margin.

So what am I supposed to do? Put my laptop in the same spot every night, plug it in, plug in the drive, and then the next morning carefully make sure the drive is unmounted before I move my laptop anywhere?

That’s kind of ridiculous. Network storage works. Apple has supported it for years.

If they don’t want to support this, don’t let the OS do it. Until then, don’t break my backups.

I don't have a second machine to do a full restore. I just do spot checks every month to see if I'm able to restore files from various locations. It's not scientific, but it's helpful to know if a spot check fails, that there may be a larger issue.

Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.

Just as a quick follow up, I completely forgot about the tool BackupLoupe[1]. It allows you to slice into your existing Time Machine backups and find out all manner of information on what's going on, what is backed up, when and what is taking up so much space.

[1]: https://www.soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/

An interesting take. There is also brass and coppers that self-sanitize, albeit more slowly: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11279221/

And for metal surfaces which are not self-sanitizing by nature, like steel, there are coatings which can be applied to achieve the same effect. This is often used in public transport.

Citation? Microban et al are marketing bunk.

Microban is a company, not a product, and they make a wide range of products, some of which are zinc or silver based coatings and effective in slowing the growth of bacteria and fungus.

While not free, and not for any other platform than macOS. The program Parachute[1] in the App Store is very nice in downloading both photos from your library as well as files from the various locations.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?...

Another option for iOS at least is PhotoSync. It’s nice, you can pull from photos and push to basically any remote service or local server. I have it backing up to both my nas and b2.

It works well enough, but it's not without flaws either.

The desktop version works reliably, if you can get macOS to keep shares mounted for long enough, and mount them on request. The scheduler is also kinda wonky.

The iOS version has so far never finished an incremental backup overnight of our ~1TB individual libraries. It handles resume/suspend well, but for some reason, while it exports unmodified originals, it doesn't include AAE files, which the desktop version does.

PhotoSync does everything right, with the exception of trying to keep state of what has been exported, which makes little sense as it doesn't support restoring photos.

Is there a way to verify this all is safe to use? Like it won’t do something weird privacy wise? Any equivalent for windows?

I have the same paranoia, so I was happy to learn that someone made an open-source downloader for iCloud.

Anyone know if it works with ADP? I emailed them months ago but no one ever replied.

On a related question, is there a download solution that does work with ADP? I’m looking to mitigate any potential account lockout issues for family members (and, no, they will not switch out of the ecosystem).

It does. It uses PhotoKit to access photos, so it basically uses your Apple Photos app (iOS or Mac) to download the photos.

The only scripted solution I can think of that works with ADP is osxphotos[^1], but that also uses PhotoKit, and requires the user to be signed in.

Personally I use PhotoSync [^2] to backup our photos from phones to a NAS. It works reliably, and supports exporting unmodified originals as well as edited versions, and XMP/AAE metadata alongside it.

^1: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

^2: https://www.photosync-app.com/home

Advanced Data Protection

Thanks for the link

I love recutils. The database format is simple enough, it has a bunch of options for constraints, and it has Bash integration and a great Emacs mode to search, edit and verify the integrity of the database.

Sure, it's not as fast as SQLite or bigger systems, but often it's enough for smaller projects.

It's always interesting to see how many sharp edges that C, as a language, has still. I know it's a language that eschews a lot of the ergonomics found in more recent languages, but it makes me sad that we're still teaching beginners the poor form these basic operations.

I like C, but it feels like you have to have an unhealthy amount of paranoia to write it well.

Nice!

I wonder how this stacks up to Vaultwarden, which is really good.