Time Machine to a local drive for immediate restores. Backblaze for disaster recovery.
Time Machine could easily be replaced by cron and tar or some other local backup option. Other backup providers are easily found.
This is not to say anything about git-annex's usefulness or the value of supporting the developer. It just surprises me when engineers are still struggling with backups. I can kind of understand "regular folk", but that's not really the git-annex market, either.
As I understand it, HFS+ can silently corrupt your data; so, Time Machine could potentially propagate that "corrupt" data all the way through your backup disks (and possibly wipe out older, "correct" data!)
We need integrity checking both at file-system level and at backup-solution level. If I'm not mistaken, with Time Machine on an HFS+ volume, we don't have the former, and the latter is file-based and not block-based (making it not very efficient, space-wise).
> I can kind of understand "regular folk", but that's not really the git-annex market, either.
I haven't used it yet, but the git-annex assistant is trying to target that niche, with a goal of an easy-as-Dropbox user experience that hides the technical aspects of git-annex under the hood: http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/
Can you use Time Machine to shuttle data via a USB stick? How well does it work when you have more than two drives that you want to keep mostly synchronized?
Time Machine does the one thing it does really well, which is incremental, local (or network-local) backups and easy restores.
It's not for snapshotting or mirroring. I used to use CarbonCopyCloner to clone my boot drive to an external USB drive every morning at ~4am, so if the internal drive on my iMac died I had an immediate bootable replacement.
(And when the internal drive DID die, I just rebooted the machine and took nearly a year to get around to replacing the internal drive!)
Time Machine could easily be replaced by cron and tar or some other local backup option. Other backup providers are easily found.
This is not to say anything about git-annex's usefulness or the value of supporting the developer. It just surprises me when engineers are still struggling with backups. I can kind of understand "regular folk", but that's not really the git-annex market, either.