It works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD. It's not locked to Apple's ecosystem. You can back up directly to local storage, SFTP, S3, Backblaze B2, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. Time Machine is largely limited to local drives or network shares. Restic deduplicates at the chunk level across all snapshots, often achieving better space efficiency than Time Machine's hardlink-based approach. All data is encrypted client-side before leaving your machine. Time Machine encryption is optional. Restic supports append-only mode for protection against ransomware or accidental deletion. It also has a built-in check command to check integrity.
Time Machine has a reputation for silent failures and corruption issues that have frustrated users for years. Network backups (to NAS devices) use sparse bundle disk images that are notoriously fragile. A dropped connection mid-backup can corrupt the entire backup history, not just the current snapshot. https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+corruption+spar...
Time Machine sometimes decides a backup is corrupted and demands you start fresh, losing all history. Backups can stop working without obvious notification, leaving users thinking they're protected when they're not. https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/11cod08/apple_tim...
Restic is fantastic. And restic is complicated for someone who is not technical.
So there is a need to have something that works, even not in an optimal way, that saves people data.
Are you saying that Time Machine doe snot backup data correctly? But then there are other services that do.
Restic is not for the everyday Joe.
And to your point about "ignorant people" - it is as I was saying that you are an ignorant person because you do not create your own medicine, or produce your own electricity, or paint your own paintings, or build your own car. For a biochemist specializing in pharma (or Walt in Breaking Bad :)) you are an ignorant person unable to do the basic stuff: synthetizing paracetamol. It is a piece of cake.
- Did you use LXC containers, or full VMs for each sandbox?
- How did you handle SSH / network isolation?
- Any tips on making provisioning faster or keeping resources efficient?
We’re using unprivileged LXC + SSH jump hosts on a single VM for cost efficiency.
I’d love to hear what tradeoffs you found using the Proxmox API.
My setup is quite purpose built. I use Orleans as the main fabric of our codebase. But since the Orleans cluster is a 'virtual computer' in a sense, you can't rely on anything outside the runtime, since you don't know which machine your code is executing on.
So a Grain calls Proxmox with a generated SSH Key / CloudInit, then persists that to state, then deploys an Orleans client which connects to the cluster for any client side C# execution. There's lots you could do for isolated networks with the LXC setup, but my uses didn't require it.
Proxmox handles the horizontal scaling of the hardware.
Orleans handles the horizontal scaling of the codebase.
It never left the preview stage, so they did not feel confident calling it stable enough for their users and I don't use preview versions for products where there are already 10 production grade competitors.
Uncharitable but yeah, reality isn't always charitable.
It’s great advice and exactly how I live my life. Programming was a hobby and then a profession, I still use the phrase ‘working’ but really it’s play with outcomes.
