by hedgehog 11 hours ago
I don't know what's happened to Time Machine, with the capabilities available in APFS etc it should be much better if anything. But it's not. Thankfully the failure mode I've experienced didn't lead to data loss but I definitely don't trust it any more.
Luckily I had Backblaze backup set up on our machines. In addition, this older iMac can still be booted up in Target disk mode, i.e. acting like an external drive. So I could salvage all data.
Another funny thing is that Mac’s built in diagnostic mode, after running for good 20 minutes, proclaimed there were no issues with the system. Even though it was clearly failing in the graphics department, even when booting into an installer usb drive (or even a Linux live mode).
It was always shit. I have seen horror stories going back since the day it came out.
Think my favourite was a conceptual flaw. The lightning strike. You need a completely offline backup or you don't have a backup.
Edit: using ChronoSync and two external (hard) disks, rotated once a month off site at the moment. That has a nice fat VERIFY button on it.
Did time machine start using the APFS features? I thought it was still doing HFS+ stuff?