Time Machine over a network is a mess, using Arq instead

7 has been unobtrusive so far, backing up about 50GB to B2. Its energy use is never an issue.

I took a look at it, installed and tried it out. It backed everything up to both attached drives, NAS, and the Arq cloud. It did what it said it would do. One backup plan issue that I found is that I’d want to backup only a single drive (Macintosh HD) with excluded directories and ignore any of the mounted volumes that I have at the time of the backup.

The one feature that it is missing that TimeMachine has is restoring a computer back to a previous state after replacing the hard drive. I’ve had to do this twice over the time I’ve had my Macs.

Having had to install Big Sur from scratch, I realized that most of the restoring process for me is really installing apps. Much of my data and configuration is already in the cloud somewhere, or on a RAID drive somewhere.

So, I’ve decided it doesn’t quite give me anything other than perhaps a full disk image (unpacked) in the cloud. Have to decide if there’s value in that for me.

I skipped Version 6 entirely as soon as I saw the awful UI.

Version 7 is the natural successor to version 5 and seems to work great in my experience.

Hopefully soon we’ll all just pretend that Version 6 was a fever dream that never really happened :slight_smile:

I had bought a Time Capsule like a decade ago and never managed to get it to work. Admittedly, I like plug and play, so if something does not work immediately I tend to give up on it. I have since had plans to do something with it, maybe the time has come. Thanks!

Btw and a little OT: TM seems to eat up huge chunks of my SSD even for local backups, so even though I like the idea of having a handy hourly/daily etc. backup it comes at a cost.

Thanks for this.
I’ve just moved house and I now have my Time Capsule receiving hourly Arq backups (takes under 5 minutes and hardly any resources, and I haven’t even got my wired network up and running yet), Backblaze is running happily on a networked Mac Mini, and I am happy to have multiple backups/copies on site, and a cloud backup in reserve.

It’s early days, but already feels so much nicer than using Time Machine (which was revolutionary for me when I first used it and got me hooked on backing up, so credit where credit’s due).

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Like @tjluoma I’m ready to start using Arq in favor of TM for networked backups. The main issue is not with TM per se. But, no matter what I do, Spotlight keeps indexing my remote TM backups making the fans on my MBP constantly spin up. The indexing of the remote disk goes on forever. And yes, I have made every setting possible to exclude the TM shared drive from being indexed.

My new solution will be an external SSD for TM. And Arq (probably with Minio) for backups to a Synology NAS.

Do you have any assurance that switching to Arq will solve this problem?

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If all else fails, Arq supports backing up over SFTP, so he could avoid mounting his backup as an SMB share entirely.

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When I used Time Machine to backup to a Synology, the backup would get corrupted every now and then. Currently, I use Time Machine to an external drive and Arq to an external drive and Synology.

I like the ease of restore for Time Machine.

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No. I do have evidence that since I stopped using TM (and not using Arq yet) my Mac is finally functioning normally again. Even other weird issues (network connections that stopped working entirely out of the blue) seem to have gone. It appears that the almost constant Spotlight indexing of the TM share f*cked up a lot.
But I need to do a lot more testing before I can come to a final conclusion.

I do like the concept and convenience of TM b.t.w. And have used it to restore some accidentally overwritten file more than once.

I was under the impression that Spotlight did not index network shares. Is that not true?

Perhaps it is different if MacOS knows the share was mounted specifically by the time machine process?

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That’s what I thought too. But I’m convinced now that Spotlight was constantly indexing my TM network drive (shared via Samba). Since I removed that share and stopped automatic TM backups, I haven’t seen any Spotlight processes eating up CPU or appearing in the “Using Significant Energy” menu.

I don’t have any other explanation than that Spotlight must have been working on that TM share. Despite the fact that I also excluded that share in the Privacy tab for Spotlight.

@tjluoma Out of curiosity (and to learn), what do you backup using Arq? “All drives” (an Arq option), just certain folders, or something else?

I’m asking because I picked the “all drives” option. Which is fine. But I noticed that Arq takes a while to scan for changes each time. Which doesn’t seem like a good use of resources.

I’m just doing my home folder to another Mac.

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I took the plunge and quit Time Machine in favor of Arq. And believe it or not, a couple of issues on my Mac have gone. No more endless Spotlight updates. And, so far, no more network issues. Could be coincidence, but tI don’t think so.

Arq is backing up to a Synology NAS running Minio (S3-type object storage) over http. So no need for shares to the backup drive either. :+1:

I have several backup plans for my Mac. A big one that runs at night. And one of the full User folder that runs hourly. The last one only takes about a minute or so to finish.

I might run TM on an external SSD. But since I don’t have one laying around, Arq should do for now. That is, besides weekly CCC backups and others.

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Arq never tells me “Something Bad Happened and Now You Need to Restart Your Backups From Scratch.”

Or leaves an enormous .inProgress file in the backup directory, quietly sitting there with no alert there’s anything wrong :roll_eyes:

And yes, TM is still a decent option (not perfect, but free and available and better than no backups at all!), but it’s only performant with hard-wired drives.

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I’ll second this. Time Machine started working much better once I moved it from my NAS to an external HD wired to my iMac.

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me too. TimeMachine to Synology (and a usb drive) works well all the time on my iMac and Macbook. Just works.

I realize this marks me a dinosaur, but TM still works fine with my Time Capsule (which, of course, is a network appliance).

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I still have the last Airport Extreme Apple made and it’s still a rock-solid performer, so no judgment on the Time Capsule :wink:

And over a decade ago I thought I had a brilliant idea to backup to a USB-2 AirDisk on the previous-gen Airport Extreme. Even on a POE connection, it was a tarpit of data, slooooooooowly backing up.

And not to hijack the thread but I’ve been considering moving to CCC for local backups. I just need it to do a snapshot-style backup as TM does, but better. :slight_smile: