For a very long time I thought Time Machine had become flaky, and I'm sure it's partially to blame, but with my current setup I've literally never observed it corrupt a backup and have to start over.

Before I was using one of the common Synology consumer NAS boxes that are often recommended. The NAS didn't report any errors with the drives or its own hardware, but at least once a month TM would glitch on at least one of my home laptops.

My new setup is an Asus FLASHSTOR 12 Pro Gen2 FS6812X. For a year now it's been running without a single apparent TM glitch while backing up multiple personal laptops and my work laptop. Sometimes I'm plugged in and sometimes I'm backing up over WiFi, but it's always worked.

I tried various recommended settings for the Synology and nothing helped so I strongly suspect that the Synology network protocol(SMB, AFP, etc.) implementations were either buggy themselves or at least not compatible with quirks in Apple's implementations. Synology->Asus fixed all my TM problems instantly and seemingly permanantly!

I can't remember the exact phrasing, but are you talking about the error message that essentially says: "The Tardis is broken. Your backup has diverged into an entirely separate timeline, and I have no way of reconciling it. You may now sacrifice an entire weekend to do an initial backup again."?

I've been on a lucky streak for several years now, where I haven't gotten that one on any of my devices.

"Preparing backup..." taking an unreasonable amount of time is a regular occurrence, and some edge cases around adjusting TM backup size quotas aren't handled well. But other than that, TM has been working reasonably well for me to back up 10 TB over SMB to a Synology NAS.

My gripe is much more with Apple's abysmal support for SMB and NFS, especially after deprecating AFP. I've been back and forth between them over the years and over several OS versions, and their implementations for both are just terrible.

But over time SMB, for me, proved slightly more stable and performant, with the right tweaks in smb.conf, and authentication and permissions/ownership are easier to deal with than NFS, so I stuck with that.

I also yearn for the days where TM just worked, because somehow, the alternatives are even worse:

- Arq Backup does some things quite well, which is why I use it as part of my 3-2-1. But some of its bugs and implementation decisions just scream "hobby grade" to me.

- Kopia looks interesting, but it's not mature enough yet. Failed for me with absolutely cryptic error messages during repo init both times I tried it, with versions several months apart.

- Restic, Borg / Vorta: Not turnkey enough for me.

Time Machine to a network share via Samba has been pretty reliable for me - only once has it corrupted itself in the five+ years I’ve been using it.

Amusingly enough Time Machine to a local drive failed completely.

I've been using Time Machine for six months pointing to a network share on my TrueNAS box and it has worked fine. Sometimes a backup will fail when the Mac is taken off my home network (it doesn't play nice with Tailscale for whatever reason) but it will always work again if I tell it to retry the failed backup once I'm back on the local network.

Yeah, 10GbE-over-copper switches are SO expensive. I bought a Ubiquiti enterprise switch for my home; 10Gb uplink and the copper ports are split between 2.5G and 1G. It's fine because only 1 or 2 clients can even talk 10G, and those are all across the house on Cat5 links anyway so they only negotiate to 2.5 even on a 10G port.

As much as I wanted to "future proof" by having a 24 port 10GbE switch... why? I'll just wait and buy one when I have a use for it.

> The high expense of 10gig is, in part, because it isn't widely necessary and the people buying it are willing to pay extra.

I think the price has more to do with where you live and how the market is structured than how necessary it is. In Japan where there is competition between ISPs, I pay about $40/mo for 10Gbps.

Routers have also come down in price to where they are pretty affordable for consumers. I use a Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Fiber [1] which has three 10Gbs ports (two SPF+, one 10GbE) for $279. A TP-Link router [2] with an upstream 10GbE port and 2.5GbE LAN ports and Wi-Fi 7 is about $140. 2.5 GbE NICs have become cheap and ubiquitous and could commonly be found on $150 mini pcs (before memory and SSD prices went crazy).

Yeah it's more than more than most people need, but I definitely appreciate having the increased speed when downloading 50GB games, uploading 200GB files to YouTube, or backing up files to the cloud. I've probably never maxed out the full 10Gbps, but exceeding 1Gbps is pretty easy in relatively common use cases.

[1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cloud-gateways-compact/c...

[2] https://amzn.asia/d/03EKpC8E

Depends a lot on your work type and your prior exposure. If you only work "locally" and upload/download rarely, you may be way less demanding of your network than if you actually do distributed work with remote storage, high-bandwidth communicating tasks, etc.

Over 20 years ago, I was used to having 1g LAN for basic workstations and laptops in an office setting and probably 10-20g uplink from the building (shared by hundreds of staff). I also used 1g at home for my very small LAN between laptop, desktop, and SAN functions. But, my home ISP links were often terrible, such as 128k ADSL or even just a tethered GPRS phone at some points.

You end up with entirely different work styles when you have these different resource constraints.

I put 5Gbit internet into my home (fiber) to build my startup. I'm processing terabytes of data. I have over 100TB of storage in my basement. I can regularly saturate my internet connection. That said, I remember well when a 1Gbit connection provided enough bandwidth for a 500-person call center for daily workloads (back about 10 years ago).

I have it more for the fast nas access and being able to treat nas disks as more or less the same performance as if they were directly sata in my machine. Significantly less so about the external network aspect.

1Gb Internet service seems low these days, much less 1Gb LAN. I have 3Gb Google Fiber service and actually get 2+ for individual downloads from some internet services like Steam. Even at 2Gb it's annoying to wait tens of minutes for 100+ GiB games to download. If I go on vacation I come home with 10s of GiBs of photos and videos on multiple devices that start syncing with cloud storage.

During the day I need to pull large data files from the work VPN so it's nice that that can happen at full speed even when Steam and movie streaming are also at full throttle. Combine that with backups and moving various files back and forth to my NAS and I'm very happy to have 10Gb local wiring.