Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

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Friday, February 10, 2017

All your backups are about to be deleted... [Apple Time Machine]

Time Machine completed a verification of your b... | Official Apple Support Communities: "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you."
'via Blog this'
This sucks.



Not so much because of the failure - things go bad, and Apple's Time Machine, which seems to be the moral equivalent of a hardlink farm for snapshots, as so many UNIX systems have, is an especially vulnerable format.



More because, AFAIK, there is no Apple Time Machine way to create a second backup or third backup.



Yeah, yeah, I know: the 3-2-1 Backup Rule, 3 copies, 2 formats, 1 off-site. Fortunately, in addition to Time Machine, I have also been using CrashPlan.



At least I am glad that Apple Time Machine / Time Capsule does verification passes, even if the recovery deletes all backups. Google finds many examples of "I thought that I was ll backed up using Time Machine, but when I tried to restore, the backup was reported to be corrupt." I hope that Crashplan does proper verification.  That's what we pay such companies to do.