[HN Gopher] TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
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TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
Author : rcarmo
Score : 130 points
Date : 2026-02-01 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (taoofmac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (taoofmac.com)
| ndegruchy wrote:
| 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.
| gghffguhvc wrote:
| 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.
| ndegruchy wrote:
| 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.
| MBCook wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| ndegruchy wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| ndegruchy wrote:
| 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.
| roadbuster wrote:
| > 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."
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| roadbuster wrote:
| > [Synology] comes with dedicated Time Machine support
|
| Your umbrance is with Synology, not Apple.
|
| Apple raised security default configurations in Tahoe.
| That led to a config breakage with NAS devices which rely
| on relaxed security configurations.
|
| I agree Apple should publish a technical note / changelog
| of config changes such as this one, but Apple has never
| implied to users they'd carry a support burden for
| any/all third-party hardware vendors. To the contrary,
| they've notified users that you're meant to consult with
| your NAS vendor for configuration steps:
|
| > Check the documentation of your NAS device for help
| setting it up for use with Time Machine
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > 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
| ndegruchy wrote:
| 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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| macOS yearly updates haven't been great since they started but
| Tahoe is a new low.
|
| Apple really needs to turn things around.
| chmaynard wrote:
| Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software
| Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading
| to macOS Tahoe.
| epistasis wrote:
| Avoid it as long as possible. Mail search is broken 4 out of 5
| days that I attempt a search, and I need to go to the webmail
| versions of my accounts to find anything. Fortunately it's only
| something I need to do about once a day, unlike in prior lives,
| but holy crap they took the best ruing about macOS and kids
| destroyed jt completely.
|
| Plasma on Linux is looking pretty tempting these days,
| especially with almost all office software being web based
| these days.
|
| Switching email clients is a big lift that I need to
| investigate, and have been hesitant to jump into until
| absolutely necessary, but another week of this BS...
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used
| it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe
| because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care
| about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.
|
| The last straw is that Finder's scroll bars are broken in
| Tahoe. I put up with it until I hit an emergency at work and
| was working as fast as I could (each minute mattered), Tahoe
| was slowing me down. Tahoe didn't pass the pressure test.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Apple has broken Time Machine enough times that I would never
| consider using it at all anymore. Once upon a time, it was really
| neat, had great integration with Mac OS X, and an amazing user
| interface and experience, but it's now clearly technology that
| Apple will probably eventually drop entirely in favor of
| something less impressive all together, like telling you to buy
| more iCloud Storage.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| Hasn't the issues always been related to remote Time Machine? I
| have a usb drive I use and haven't heard of any issues with
| that setup. Am I missing something?
| claysmithr wrote:
| I use remote time machine as seem to be fine.
| Nathan2055 wrote:
| In the past, I've heard recommendations not to use remote
| Time Machine over SMB directly, but rather to create an APFS
| disk image on a remote server and then backup to that as if
| its an external hard drive.
|
| Supposedly, doing that eliminates a lot of the flakiness
| specific to SMB Time Machine, and while I haven't tested it
| personally, I have used disk images over SMB on macOS Tahoe
| recently, and they actually work great (other than the normal
| underlying annoyances of SMB that everyone with a NAS is
| mostly used to at this point).
|
| The new ASIF format for disk images added in Tahoe actually
| works very well for this sort of thing, and gives you the
| benefits of sparse bundle disk images without requiring
| specific support for them on the underlying file
| system.[1][2] As long as you're on a file system that
| supports sparse files (I think pretty much every currently
| used file system except FAT32, exFAT, and very old
| implementations of HFS+), you get almost native performance
| out of the disk image now. (Although, again, that's just
| fixing the disk image overhead, you still have to work around
| the usual SMB weirdness unless you can get another remote
| file system protocol working.)
|
| [1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/12/macos-tahoe-brings-
| a-new...
|
| [2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/17/should-you-use-
| tahoes-ne...
| jbverschoor wrote:
| SMB on macOS is and always has, and probably will always be
| utter shit.
|
| Mount something over NFS< and you'll be relieved about how
| snappy things remain. Snappy relatively of course.
|
| Yes, there's some bug in the backupd that panic.. no matter
| smb/nfs
| whartung wrote:
| I lose my Time Machine drive, like, every year or two.
|
| Sometimes, Time Machine just goes stupid and I have to wipe
| the drive and start over. All of my efforts in the past to
| copy or repair or do anything to a Time Machine drive has
| ended in folly, so when it starts acting up, I just wipe it
| and start anew.
|
| Other times, it's the drive itself, and I swap it out.
|
| 99% of the time, it Just Works. Wiping the drive for me is
| more annoying than catastrophic (99.9999% of the time I don't
| care about my 18 month old data). It's mostly for local
| catastrophic fat fingering on my part, and to make sure I
| have a solid back up after I do a OS update. I have BackBlaze
| for "Why is there 5 feet mud in my burning house" scenarios.
|
| Outside of that, I've always been able to recover from it.
|
| My wife has a SSD drive she plugs into her laptop for TM
| backup. That machine at most makes laps around the house, so
| its not that big of a deal for her.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Apple customers pay for backup solutions to backup data
| they don't care about and they don't even care when it
| fails.
|
| The bar is so low!
| hedgehog wrote:
| If you set your Apple device to beta updates for the previous
| release you can suppress the constant prompts to upgrade. Reduces
| the chance of accidentally upgrading.
| ashton314 wrote:
| The hedgehog knows one great thing. This is it. Thank you.
| lisper wrote:
| How do you do that?
| hedgehog wrote:
| Settings -> General -> Software Update -> Beta Updates
|
| It's the same on macOS and iOS, pick "macOS Sequoia Public
| Beta" or the corresponding release for your device. Apple
| still pushes security updates for those releases, and I
| haven't heard of any problems with the kind of minor updates
| that ship late in a major release's lifecycle, so I think the
| risk of running this way is low. This kicks the can a year or
| two down the road, at which point hopefully there are better
| workarounds.
| doawoo wrote:
| Be warned if you actually install beta software and take your
| device to the Apple Store they will not replace parts because
| of the chance the diagnostic tools aren't compatible- this bit
| me trying to get my iPhone battery replaced
| roadbuster wrote:
| Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the
| 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-
| attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's
| default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the
| box with many common NAS solutions.
|
| Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post
| title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during
| restoration.
| hughw wrote:
| Is that 5% number real or your estimate?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Yeah, it sounds a bit high to me.
| roadbuster wrote:
| It's a hand-waved estimate, but let's recognize that Apple
| actively plans on killing support for NAS targets for Time
| Machine:
|
| > Time Machine backup to NAS devices over Apple Filing
| Protocol (AFP) is not recommended and won't be supported in a
| future version of macOS.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423
| hughw wrote:
| But that's AFP, not SMB. SMB is the future. [edit, that
| sounds sad].
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| AFP is what's deprecated, not Time Machine over networks.
| They just want you to use SMB.
| roadbuster wrote:
| Acknowledged. Thanks for pointing that out.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for
| the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than
| direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure),
| Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work
| out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
|
| I'd argue that's not even the main problem. If it just broke
| and gave you error on each run ("this SMB share is
| incompatible") it wouldn't be an issue
| H8crilA wrote:
| The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem
| in the first place?
| ndegruchy wrote:
| 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.
| _rs wrote:
| I agree - I am running my own Samba server and I don't think
| I'm affected, but it isn't really clear to me how to double
| check or why Apple's new default broke things in the first
| place
| rcarmo wrote:
| Hi! OP here. In my case Time Machine stopped doing backups to
| the server, period, and would keep silently refusing to do so.
| I encourage you to check backups are happening.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Time Machine has always been a bit ropey on SMB shares. I think
| it's in part because it creates a disk image on the share then
| writes to that. This creates a lot more work and potential for
| things to go wrong.
|
| If you want to backup across the network then it's probably best
| to choose some third party software.
| btreesOfSpring wrote:
| I have been trying to trouble shoot a Time Machine issue since
| upgrading to Tahoe. It is usb backup. So far none of the most
| recent stated fixes work.
|
| An initial backup on newly formatted disk will run but very
| slowly. Perhaps reaching 100% but it never finishes. At some
| point the percentage will change and the backup will stay stuck
| at somewhere near 10%. Cancel backup and run it again. Gets to
| ~10% and stays stuck. Multiple drives. Re-fs'ed. Boot into safe
| mode. Networking off. Etc, etc. etc. The TimeMachineMechanic app
| doesn't have any revealing feedback. I can run a full tar backup
| to the same disks.
|
| No idea.
|
| I haven't tried backing up to a network share but really, it
| shouldn't be this difficult.
|
| Clearly someone didn't test a bunch of edge cases when pushing
| this one out.
| hughw wrote:
| The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a
| network file system for backups? It's so fragile you can't rely
| on it. It's gotten better in recent years, possibly due to APFS,
| but that just means somewhat longer intervals between disasters
| (wipe out and reinitialize, losing all your backups). A T.M.
| using a custom protocol to save and restore blocks would fail
| sometimes too, but not ruin all your existing backups.
|
| edit: I use Arq for daily backups, but T.M. for hourly. When T.M.
| eventually craters its storage, I have robust dailies in the
| cloud, so no worries.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a
| network file system for backups?
|
| The problem is them fucking up. Every other popular backup
| solution that does it does it just fine. And doesn't hide
| failures silently
| maxkfranz wrote:
| I'm a big fan of SuperDuper [1]. I use it for daily differential
| backups to a secondary SSD. I don't get the hourly backups that
| TimeMachine has, but my SuperDuper backups are directly bootable
| in the event that my system disk dies.
|
| I'm sure you could do the same with cron and rsync, but I can't
| be bothered.
|
| [1] https://shirt-
| pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.ht...
| ndegruchy wrote:
| 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.
| maxkfranz wrote:
| 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.
| codeulike wrote:
| Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the
| fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?)
| but it's not really useable. It pretends that backups-over-the-
| network are a possibility but its completely unstable over the
| network and invariably decides the backup is corrupt after a few
| months and then tells you you have to start from scratch.
| dijit wrote:
| idk, works for me.
|
| On the extremely rare occasion I have to replace my laptop, I
| literally just point it to the backup on the network with the
| cable plugged in, and an hour later it's "my laptop" again.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files
| to restore?
|
| That's why I like it. Some of the visual flare is of course
| superfluous, but the timeline really is nice.
|
| It's like git except it works without me having to think about
| it. (To be clear, git is much better, but I have to think about
| it.)
| ezfe wrote:
| When backing up to a local system it is extremely useable and
| reliable. It creates separate snapshot volumes for each backup
| and can be navigated in the Finder interface or using the fancy
| space interface.
|
| Also, backups over the network are possible and have worked
| well for me for a few years.
| tlb wrote:
| If you set Time Machine to use encrypted backups, it will create
| a fake disk that's really a directory tree with a bunch of
| gigabyte-sized binary chunks. This is safer because it doesn't
| require the file system to support anything fancy like symlinks
| or case-insensitive unicode file names. One downside is that
| restoring to anything other than a Mac is nontrivial.
| doawoo wrote:
| This 100% - it's funny how it's actually more reliable in my
| experience to use the encrypted sparse bundle. I can sling it
| over to my NAS no problem. I've restored from one and
| everything was perfectly fine. YMMV of course
| jbverschoor wrote:
| It reliably kernel panics since tahoe at a certain point
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| restic and kopia should work decently, if with a bit of setup, I
| think both can just mount backup as FUSE filesystem
|
| The backup system that silently breaks when it doesn't like
| something in backend is not worth time
| ddtaylor wrote:
| On Linux we get this for free with Btrfs copy on write snapshots,
| snapper, and Btrfs Assistant.
| userbinator wrote:
| Apple has always had problems with SMB since they switched from
| one of the open-source implementations to one it internally
| developed, many yaers ago.
|
| Then again, SMB especially in its newer versions seems to be a
| protocol developed by MS with one of its goals being to make
| third-party implementations as difficult as possible.
| riley_dog wrote:
| I have the same setup and it works fine on my machine.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| lemonwaterlime wrote:
| I had so many corrupted Time Machine backups over the years that
| I eventually just wrote an incremental backup script in rsync.
| I'm much happier.
|
| Something like [1] can be inspiration.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/perfacilis/backup
| evilmonkey19 wrote:
| Just for the record: I wanted to see your content, but I couldn't
| because in Spain when there's football they block most websites
| to "avoid illegal football IP lists"... LaLiga can block anything
| they want without any restriction, even you website which I doubt
| about it. I can barely navigate... I will read it later tomorrow.
| This why you might see 0 traffic from Spain.
| greggh wrote:
| On Tahoe my Time Machine was broken after the update. My backup
| target is on a QNAP NAS. I just had to set it up from scratch
| again and it worked. But it did cost me a few files I was trying
| to recover. So I feel this.
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