mikethemartian

hmlongco said:

The President should have cracked a history book and read about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and how it pretty much triggered the Great Depression.

Then again, the Great Derision was worldwide, and the halting of free trade gave way to a ton of disaffected people with no jobs and no hope. Including a Germany that was already struggling under WWI reparations.

And which gave rise to the Nazi party, Nazi Germany, and all of the rest.

Hmm. Maybe he did study the history of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act after all.

But regardless of that, those tariffs were met with reciprocal tariffs from around the world. Sound familiar?

The bottom line? Everyone got poorer.

Not wealthier.

mpantone said:

It is unrealistic to think that Apple intended Time Machine to be the perfect backup solution for every single Mac on this planet.

Clearly it was designed to be a simple tool for consumer use. If it were too complicated Joe Consumer wouldn't use it and a Time Machine backup is better than no backups at all.

In the same way Apple Mail is good for personal/SOHO use, could handle something like a group list to the parents of your kid's softball team. But it's not the right tool to compose and e-mail your 20,000 subscriber list (there are longtime tools like MailChimp that take care of that).

Breaking news alert: the Photos app isn't Photoshop either.

One thing that is certain is Time Machine is a way better (free, included with the OS) backup solution than anything Windows has ever put out and I've used Windows since the 95/98/NT era side-by-side with Macs going back to late System 6 (early Nineties). And we know what a Linux pundit would say: "Just open a shell and fire up dd. It's way better than Time Machine." LOL

If you are doing professional work on your computer, prepare to pay extra for professional grade disk tools.

I've used Time Machine to do a complete OS restore. I've also seen Time Machine fail to do it as well. I have used it successfully to recover specific files/directories.

Remember that is something is worth backing up, it's worth backing up twice. That's an old system administrator's adage.

There are other disk management utilities out there if Time Machine isn't cutting it for you. Since Time Machine's feature set has been stagnant for 10+ years, you should know by now whether or not Time Machine is adequate for you/your organization's current needs.

One thing I will bet a buffalo nickel on: Apple will not be putting any effort into making Time Machine a more robust backup solution. Remember that it is part of the free basic macOS. Software engineering isn't free so Apple needs to be selective about how they allocate engineering talent to the various features of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, whatever. Expecting them to develop Time Machine into a full fledged professional-grade backup system is naïve at best.

For sure Apple will stick more engineers on the Photos app or iMessage than Time Machine.