Bombich Software Blog

My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be no support and the forums are not going to help. The broken backup is not going to be able to be repaired. Time Machine uses the "fuck you user" approach of not providing any information about what it does, or doesn't, or intends to do or whatever. If your data is worth backing up, don't use Time Machine. [0] https://bombich.com

Can I make a suggestion? 1) Before sending your Mac in for repair, use Carbon Copy Cloner [1] or SuperDuper! [2] to make a clone of your system drive to a spare SSD. 2) When your Mac is returned to you, if the system drive has been wiped, then use the same software to restore your backup. Both these programs are free (gratis) for the described use, and have a reputation for reliability. The spare SSD drive will cost about $80 (how much is your time worth?). [1] https://bombich.com [2] https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

I could not recommend Carbon Copy Cloner enough. It makes your external hard disk bootable and verbatim has the same files as your mac. This is for Mac only. Think of a dd with a nice interface. Costs $40. https://bombich.com/

Either of SuperDuper! http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html or Carbon Copy Cloner https://bombich.com/ is great for making a complete, bootable copy of a drive.

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 :-)).

> 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…

On macOS, two backup programs are doing this: * https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html * https://bombich.com Also, Little Snitch, a network monitoring/firewall tool: * https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Then: Matrix, an offline reader for my online service CIX (https://cix.uk/forums/overview) Now: Carbon Copy Cloner. (https://bombich.com/)

I’ve gave up with Time Machine and switched to Carbon Copy Cloner (https://bombich.com). Not coming back. Solid well-maintained software. One nice differentiating feature is that it fully supports bootable backups.

Sorry for your loss. Here are my two cents... For complete system backup on Windows use Acronis [0], on MacOS use Carbon Copy Cloner [1] and on Linux Clonezilla [2]. Also never forget the 3-2-1 rule of backups [3], 3 copies, 2 local copies on different mediums and 1 copy offsite (cloud, remote) :-) [0] https://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer-backup/ [1] https://bombich.com/ [2] https://clonezilla.org/ [3] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

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

Check out Carbon Copy Cloner [1] if you haven't already. It will create a bootable clone of your drive, with deltas and versions and all that good stuff. During fast-moving projects I usually clone daily. In the event of a drive failure I can simply reboot the Mac from the clone as if nothing happened, cloning back to new internal drive (or machine in case of theft). [1] http://www.bombich.com/

You have backups but apparently no feasible restores. I have always an up-to-date image of my Macs created and updated each night with Carbon Copy Cloner (before that, I use SuperDuper!). In case of a problem with any of my Macs, I can simply boot from the image on another Mac and continue to work. If I cannot fix the problem, I copy the image to the respective Mac or a new Mac … Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC): http://www.bombich.com/ SuperDuper!: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/

You might want to look into rsync as a replacement for scp. Version 2 is built in, but if you follow the directions at: http://www.bombich.com/rsync.html you can build a newer rsync that syncs all metadata.

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… 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.

> 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.

I am a long-time CCC user, but bootable backups haven't been supported for a while now, basically since Big Sur -- if you're counting on that, make sure you're testing it regularly. https://bombich.com/blog/2024/12/19/bootable-backups-have-been-depreca…

Here's an explanation with graphics: https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/working-apfs-volume-groups However, if you've used ZFS, APFS containers are essentially identical to the concept of a ZFS dataset.

CCC costs $77.50 AUD per major version just to use the app - it might be OK but that's a lot of money! TimeMachine is free and "good enough" for local / local network backups for most people, for remote backup BorgBase (although the "Vorta" borg GUI app is dreadful) and Backblaze are affordable-ish options. Also it doesn't look like CCC has write-only backups (immutable from the client side once created) like Borg has, there's no mention of encryption or deduplication in their feature list either - https://bombich.com/features

It's not accepting cookies vs not accepting cookies; it's accepting non-essential (tracking + others) cookies vs rejecting those. While this is an interesting question/argument, I'd argue that adding a cookie to represent that you have rejected all cookies might be considered an acceptable essential cookie, since it's expected you need to reject them all only once. See here for example: https://bombich.com/cookies#essential

They have managed to obtain the special entitlement. Source: https://bombich.com/blog/2018/03/30/building-better-backups-carbon-cop… They’re one of two apps in the world who have been granted the entitlement as far as I know. The other one is Time Machine.

> Apple can. I can’t. Making APFS snapshots requires special entitlements, which they’re not going to give me. What makes you think that? Carbon Copy Cloner does this, and is made by a small independent developer. https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/leveraging-snapshots-on-apfs-volumes

Carbon Copy Cloner 5.1.23-b1 is available as a universal app and can make bootable backups on Big Sur as well: https://bombich.com/blog/2020/11/03/yes-you-can-have-bootable-backups-…

You can do. Bootable backup to a remote system. The initial back up needs to be done locally then the back up disk can be moved remote. This was easier pre-Catalina https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/using-carbon-copy-cloner-back-up-another-m…

From Carbon Copy Cloner 5.1.22-b1 release notes[0]: "This build continues our beta testing cycle for macOS 'Big Sur' 11. In the current macOS beta, CCC will create Data Volume backups of any Big Sur startup volumes. Apple's APFS replication utility is not currently capable of replicating a Big Sur System volume (as of Big Sur Beta 6). We're working with Apple to develop the functionality within macOS that will allow third-party backup applications to continue making backups of macOS System volumes. In the meantime, we're making complete backups of your data, and those backups can be seamlessly used alongside the macOS Installer or Migration Assistant to produce a bootable backup or to facilitate a restore." [0] https://bombich.com/software/updates/ccc5_rn_beta.html

This is also the case with APFS on rotational disk drives. Why does APFS perform so much worse on HDD vs SSD? Will Apple fix it? https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apfs-enumeration-performa…

This applies only too MacOS. I use CCC(Carbon Copy Cloner) to do a full bootable volume backup, which is triggered every night, around 9pm. I go to sleep after 10, so I can switch off my desktop. When I move to a new machine, I use Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant to migrate data from a CCC backup to a new Mac. [1] Has worked seamlessly for me across devices as well: :laptops, Mac mini and iMacs. [1]: https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/i-want-clone-my-entire-hard-drive-new-hard…

> New home for the [in]famous filesystem BTRFS Submitter changed the title to mock BTRFS. Which is funny, since APFS is probably at least as bad, and likely much worse[1], yet given how many Apple fanboys there are here, I doubt similar mocking of it would be tolerated. [1] https://bombich.com/blog/2018/02/15/macos-may-lose-data-on-apfs-format…

Woohoo! Another data point! https://bombich.com/blog/2018/02/15/macos-may-lose-data-on-apfs-format…