TFA:
> Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago, and has repeatedly told us that support for its predecessor AFP will be removed in the future.
- BigCo already is a zero-sum deal, they use Xcode-cloud as a service, which runs back on their servers anyway... (Google, Amazon, Azure, etc)
- It was not a long-standing product. Introduced somewhere around 2016~ish if I remember correctly. Only lasted a few major releases. Easier to kill than an established one (ie. TimeMachine)
They aren’t deprecating Time Machine. The old protocol is being removed.
The old protocol hasn’t worked well for a long time, at least in my experience
Also it's honestly really weird that they don't have iCloud backups for Macs yet. It seems like a no-brainer feature. I know I would easily switch to Apple over Backblaze as Backblaze's client is just terrible.
I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.
Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...
And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.
So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.
I've loopback mounted disk images over network filesystems for many years without any recurring issues outside of macOS. It's not rocket science, particularly if you have a reliable network connection.
I'm aware there's a long tail of possible issues that can come up, but most of the complaints I've seen amount to "I have a reliable connection and Time Machine is still a tire fire", which suggests that the problem exists outside of that particular set of edge cases.
(It seems to genuinely be that nobody at Apple really cares about network filesystems at this point - people in this thread talking up AFP makes me want to look at migrating _to_ using it for my mac's backups, because SMB on macOS randomly drops or hangs for no reason and Time Machine at least twice has just started stating the backup was completely unreadable, leading to me having to restore the backup filesystem from backups.
And attempting to use NFS on macOS somehow makes everything three times as buggy, like they special cased SMB shares to not be touched in some random "touch everything synchronously" calls throughout the OS but didn't do it with NFS shares, so Finder will now take seconds or minutes to do things that shouldn't involve that share, but as soon as you remove it, it stops doing so.)
The "new computer" out of box account creation and first sign in experience on both Windows 11 and MacOS are clearly designed to drive end users towards perpetual for life monthly recurring subscriptions for (Microsoft 365 Personal, OneDrive, iCloud storage, etc).
Imagine the difficulty for the ordinary non technical person (absolutely not a stereotypical HN reader) ever being able to stop paying for iCloud when they have 600GB+ of their family photos and videos and stuff backed up to it.
To be fair, non technical folks get a lot of value from this scheme too. I can't imagine many of my relatives successfully juggling backups and external media in a way that would actually keep their content safe in case their phone is lost/stolen/destroyed.
Right now the monthly fees for this stuff are rather modest, but I could see a future where the dominant players lock out competitors and use their market position to raise prices significantly.