We also recommend backing up your data on a regular basis until you receive a replacement drive.
Why stop there? With tools and services like Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner and Crashplan, there's no excuse not to maintain a backup. As evidenced by this page, shit happens.
I keep two backups, one onsite through Time Machine, one offsite using BackBlaze. After initial set up the maintenance time on them is about 2 minutes a month to check they've been running properly, total cost is a cheap external drive and $5 a month.
Well, be extremely careful with Backblaze. I got bit on the ass by them. It turns out their dashboard is just caching it's results, and there are instances where the dashboards will say they have data when they really don't.
I learned this the hard way when we brought my girlfriend's computer in for repair. We gave them permission to replace the drive, went to restore the data from Backblaze, and got a nasty surprise when it errored out and their support team let us know the data wasn't there. As far as I'm concerned using Backblaze is not the same as actually having off site backups, unfortunately.
That's not a real solution though, it's half of a solution at best. All you're providing is a place to dump files, with none of the services that a backup solution would actually provide.
This may be fantastic for technical users, but it would be a nightmare if I used this to manage the backups of friends and family.
Ultimately I switched to CrashPlan, as that not only gave me offsite backups (for far cheaper than you, sorry) but using the same technology also offers me on site backups and the ability to back up to any server I control and choose. This allows me to have my friends backup to the CrashPlan service, to their own local drive, and to a computer I setup just in case both of those fail. Best part is I'm not stuck doing a bunch of work.
As a final note, your service is extremely expensive compared to just about everything else.
Is this if I log into backblaze.com there may be files it says it has which it does not, or if the UI on my Mac says it's backed up it may not be? (Or both?)
All you need to do is run a "dumb"[1] rsync to a backup provider running on ZFS, and the remote will have its own set of day/week/month snapshots - exactly like time machine[2].
Now if only there were such a provider ... standards based rsync over ssh ? Remote ZFS filesystem ? 12+ years of history providing that service ? Progressive stance on govt. monitoring ?[3] No, it would be too good to be true.
[1] Dumb, as in, just a straight 1:1 mirror.
[2] But independent - no relation to TM on your own system
One important difference between Time Machine and using rsync.net in the way you describe is that Time Machine doesn't require trusting anyone with your data[0].
Of course, it's possible to have encrypted snapshots on rsync.net with duplicity[1], the method I use. That being said, I have no particular reason to distrust rsync.net, and I have liked the service they have provided. If anything, I trust rsync.net more than other backup providers and certainly more than Apple.
[0]: Assuming Apple hasn't set up Time Machine to secretly send files back to Apple. But if you run Mac OS X, you're already trusting them not to do something like that.
Time Machine will regularly (as in once a month or two for my household of Macs, sometimes in as little as a week) complain "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you." Apple says don't backup to a NAS. Plenty of folks have reported problems.
Getting it set up in the first place [0] keeps the selection of customers significantly smaller than those that are better off just buying a Time Capsule, or even sticking a USB drive onto an Airport Extreme (which I recall seemed to work fine). And Apple did say it's not supported. I wish they'd just fix it. IIRC, it worked reliably pre-Lion. EDIT: or for that matter, why not just bundle up the page I referenced into a nice app bundle with a pretty icon?
A more significant problem is that Synology (which is what I use) is out there saying, "Time Machine: works great with a Synology NAS!". And it does work great...until it doesn't, and last I checked Synology has no docs on how to fix it.
As for Mavericks, I'm pretty sure I've seen the problem on the one machine I have running the dev preview. Or maybe not, maybe it was before I put Mavericks on (I realize that's not terribly helpful information). The problem with saying whether it's better or not is that on my machines it may be a month or more before it rears its head. So it would take me six months or so before I could personally say that it's better for me.
Buy a Time Capsule if you want the Apple experience. It will cost you, but then it's Apple's solution.
Apple Time Machine has never been friendly to NAS other than Time Capsule. You have to do some hackery to get it setup, so the above fix steps are suitable for that crowd.
There was a technical discussion of the protocol used for networked time machine backups on the apple support pages but I can't find it back. Basicaly TM was designed to be local first, and adapted to also work over ethernet afterwards, but doesn't properly recover when you have failures (i.e. corrupted data or lost connection) at the wrong timing during the backups. From memory the network protocol changed one or two years ago to be more reliable, but the fundamental assumptions seem to have remained.
That's why it's advised you do at least your first backup with a wired connection for instance.
CrashPlan doesn't require that you use their service. The client software (which is free) is also server software, and you can backup to your own server(s).
CrashPlan's java based software just basically died on me after a while, so I switched to backblaze, which had much better performance. But people are now talking about bad experiences when they actually try to restore from backblaze. You can't win with these things it seems.
Currently I do Laptop + Time Machine HDD at work & a backup file server at home which syncs with my laptop with bittorrent sync and the file server is backed up by backblaze.
CrashPlan process in linux occasionally eats up most of the cpu. As a result of this I haven't been able to complete a single full upload after trying it for the last 4 months for a few hundred GBs. I have paid for a full year but I don't think it makes sense to renew. CrashPlan sync is just too slow and CPU heavy for a laptop that is used for dev work at the same time.
Do not rely completely on Time Machine backups. I learnt the lesson in a painful way. My MBP crashed a few years back, and Apple decided to replace the motherboard. Unfortunately, Time Machine detected this as a new laptop, and won't let me restore from the backups.
These days, i backup only user data and i don't worry about the base OS. In fact, i prefer this over TimeMachine style backups. Photos go to Google Drive, work related documents to Dropbox, all code goes to BitBucket/Github, and thats about it. Videos and other personal stuff get backed to an external disk.
You can absolutely use time machine backups with a different Mac, the process is slightly different but still works.
Migrating a Time Machine backup to a new Mac
When you buy a new Mac, you can transfer all of your applications, files, settings, and other information from a Time Machine backup you've already made.
You will be asked if you want to transfer files when you start up your new Mac for the first time. Or, you can use the Migration Assistant (located in Applications/Utilities).
After Migration Assistant completes the transfer and you select your existing Time Machine backup drive, you will be prompted with "Inherit Backup History". Once selected you will be able to continue to use your existing Time Machine backup on your new Mac.
Sorry, you did something wrong. One of Time Machine's core functions is to migrate old laptops to newer laptops. It absolutely does not refuse to let you restore across new hardware.
Do not rely completely on Time Machine backups. I learnt the lesson in a painful way. My MBP crashed a few years back, and Apple decided to replace the motherboard. Unfortunately, Time Machine detected this as a new laptop, and won't let me restore from the backups.
But Time Machine backups are just a folder with (yet another) folder per backup timestamp. It doesn't use deltas or anything fancy, unchanged files are just hard linked.
In other words, you can browse a Time Machine backup like any other filesystem. For instance, you could just use cp or rsync to restore an exact copy.
On a Time Capsule or Airport Extreme with external hard disk, the files live in some disk image IIRC, but even there it is generally not hard to restore files.
You can exclude the OS and applications from your Time Machine backups if you want. It's a great way to save space, since you can probably reinstall those from other sources.
Exactly my thought when reading this. From my experience as an Ops guy I can say that in my opinion all storage media is perishable.
And also that most friends know that they should back-up as when shit hits the platter the first thing they say is: "I know I should have backed up and my latest is from September last year, can you help me?"
At least with OSX, backups are made very easy for you via Time Machine and even better a Time Capsule.
And where is it implying that you can stop backing up after the replacement? Are you so dense or literal-minded that you need everything spelling out for you? "do not dry your pets in this microwave".
