← Back

March 5, 2026

I’ve been perfecting my backup strategy for a long time, and now, I think that it’s ready to be shared with the world!

Backing up Apple devices

I own one iPhone and one MacBook Pro.

The MacBook Pro runs both MacOS and Asahi Linux in a dual-boot fashion. In this section, I’ll talk about the MacOS partition.

Backing up iOS devices

For iOS backups, I just have an iCloud subscription. I’m paying about 120 EUR/year for this service.

I enabled Family Sharing; which allowed me to share my subscription with family members.

It makes the 10 EUR I pay every month hurt a little less.

Pros

On the plus side, backups happen by themselves, over the network. There is nothing you need to do to make it work.

Just, maybe, note down some kind of recovery key or add an emergency contact. (This reminds me that I should probably do that.)

It’s reasonably secure, with E2EE enabled.

It’s obviously still an American corporation which brings a certain set of caveats, but obviously, if your threat model includes the FBI/NSA/CIA, any computer is an immense risk. 99.9999% will never be targeted, though.

On a side note: phones are so essential to our daily lives, and no government wants us to wake up to the fact that they can spy on us at any time if they pay a shady Israeli company enough money.

So, phone trojans are usually reserved for people that are directly challenging the government, such as journalists.

Anyway…

Cons

On the con side, you can’t really open iCloud in Firefox, grab your iPhone’s backup and grab your text messages.

Other than that, backups on iPhones are flawless. I just expect to be able to throw my iPhone in the water, go to the Apple Store, get a new one and have everything there except maybe the data from the last 3-4 hours.

Backing up MacOS with Time Machine

I have a MacBook M2 Pro. It had a really rough life.

Early in its career, it got a bad case of flu and the motherboard died. Thankfully, it was still under warranty and I could get it fixed by Apple.

However, 3 weeks ago, it jumped from the table and broke its screen. Sadly, it’s not covered by insurance anymore, so I’ll have to figure something out by myself. I am sad about it since someone figured out 120Hz support for this machine on Asahi Linux and I really wanted to give it a try.

Pros of Time Machine

I really love Time Machine for one thing: if your laptop dies, you can go to an Apple Store, get a new one, and be up and running with the exact same workspace in the afternoon. Everything gets saved, and when you restore it on a new laptop, everything is there where you expect it to be.

It’s exactly the same as an iPhone except that backups are somewhat manual. You need to buy an SSD, connect it, make sure that backups are running… I wish it happened in the background and was uploaded to the cloud. This is 100% possible with current technology, so I am not sure if that’s not already the default.

About the first time the motherboard died: well, I left it in my motorcycle for a few hours at night in a place with high air humidity. When I opened the laptop the next day, it was a bit watery.

I didn’t think much of it.

After a few days, it started behaving weird. Two weeks later, it was dead.

Thankfully, the warranty was still valid (3 days left!), and I was 30 minutes away from an Apple store. They accepted to replace the motherboard for free, but it would take a week and I would lose all my data.

Still, I needed to work. The world wouldn’t spin without me. I ended up renting a really crappy MacBook Air from the pre-historic era for super cheap.

It was incredibly slow, but after restoring from my HDD, everything was there. SSH key, passwords, browser history, etc.

I was on-call for the product I was running at the time, and having Time Machine saved me a lot of money.

I know. I could’ve just taken better care of my machine. I do now have a better case for it. But still… I believe that having Time Machine saved me at least a thousand dollars in actual sales that I would’ve lost with one week downtime.

This is not even accounting for personal factors: coworker satisfaction, stress, the value of my files…

However, Time Machine is not perfect…

Cons of Time Machine

Time Machine is quite slow, hard to debug, and also, totally incompatible with other OSes.

Let’s start with compatibility.

It’s hard to read the data from the hard drive from other OSes

As I said, my MacBook Pro died again, jumping from a table this time. I have backed it up on a HDD.

To access the data, I can:

  1. Buy a new MacOS device and restore the backup from the HDD
  2. Repair the screen. That’s probably what I will do this time
  3. Run some random scripts from GitHub to mount it and copy the data

Okay, while researching, I kind of figured out that it wouldn’t be sooo hard.

So, I will try to get it to mount right now. Let’s see!

First step is to install support for APFS on my Arch Linux (btw) box:

sudo pacman -S linux-apfs-rw-dkms

uh… I guess I’ve got to reboot my laptop right now? brb.

… okay, it didn’t work. This one doesn’t support encrypted APFS volumes. I probably should’ve read the README.md.

I’ll try apfs-fuse instead.

I tried installing it manually and got an obscure CMake error. And then, I got an obscure C++ error. As we can see, it’s far from trivial to extract files from a Time Machine backup, because mounting the underlying APFS filesystem is already a challenge.

After a bit of Claude Coding, I get apfs-fuse to install.

Uh, after thinking a little bit, I looked at the AUR and found apfs-fuse-git.

It got me excited about the AUR since it packaged the two patches that the LLM independently found!

It didn’t work, at first. Looking at GitHub issues helped.

Here’s how my session looked:

cami@onigiri ~/c/apfs-fuse (master) [SIGINT]> sudo apfs-fuse -o uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g),allow_other,snap=150163,vol=1 /dev/sda1 ~/mnt/time-machine
Volume SuperElements is encrypted.
Hint: <redacted>
Enter Password: <redacted>
WARNING: extentref tree init failed
WARNING: snap meta tree init failed

Well, alright, now I’ve got it to show all my files and I can read their content. It’s super slow (I guess it’s because it’s a HDD) but it works.

I obviously won’t show my files but I’m really happy I can get my Obsidian files on here! Okay, Time Machine. I underestimated you.

Or rather, I didn’t believe enough in Linux and open-source. Please Torvalds, forgive me.

Okay, I can see my files from Linux, so I can’t really complain.

It’s hard to debug when it doesn’t work well

One day, my backup HDD died and I had to buy a new one. It was not super obvious why the backups were not working well.

It was just super slow. I investigated a little and figured out that the HDD must’ve died when traveling

(I learned my lesson: HDDs and checked luggage don’t get along very well. That’s the reason I only buy rugged SSDs and take great care of them).

It requires a dedicated drive

On APFS, Time Machine can share a drive with regular files using separate volumes. However, that drive must be using APFS. It’s not possible to naively create a regular APFS partition on a regular drive and use that for backups.

I wanted to backup my wife’s 512GB laptop on my 4TB SSD since there was a lot of space left on it, but that’s not possible.

I might try to partition my HDD though. Okay. Maybe it’s possible to backup two machines into one hard drive, I’ll look into it.

It’s really hard to set up backups to the cloud

I researched the topic extensively, and there are people who are successful backing up their MacBook to an Apple AirPort Time Capsule which is basically an Apple NAS.

It’s been discontinued, now.

There is an option to sync your Desktop to iCloud, but it’s insanely buggy. Totally messed up my installation at some point and had to start over.

I gave up on recovering some files from iCloud. They’re here, they just don’t download.

But what if you just want to backup to a cheap SFTP server? Or if you want to backup while you are travelling?

When I tried setting something up, it just didn’t work well. I can’t quite remember what went wrong, but it was one of those cases where I just keep trying to force some software to do something it hasn’t been designed for.

Time Machine is just not the right fit for networked backups.

What about Backblaze

Backblaze Cloud Backup is SUPER buggy. Please spare yourself the trouble, it’s really bad.

My personal experience is that it’s buggy, takes a lot of CPU, the interface just hangs…

Something that you will be interested in: Backblaze installs 21 identical copies of the same executable

The programmer made a compelling argument for it on Hacker News.

The reason is basically debugging: having differently-named executables lets customers report exactly which thread is stuck (e.g. “bztrans_thread03 is hung”) instead of just “bztransmit is hung.”

I think I tried Backblaze wayyy after that HN comment and it still wasn’t resolved. This problem is actually nothing compared to the interface hanging for no reason.

Huge respect to the developer for defending himself in public, and explaining things in public, though.

Backing up Linux installations

For Linux devices, I have settled on Backrest. It’s a program that wraps restic.

Backrest is a web-accessible backup solution built on top of restic. Backrest provides a WebUI which wraps the restic CLI and makes it easy to create repos, browse snapshots, and restore files. Additionally, Backrest can run in the background and take an opinionated approach to scheduling snapshots and orchestrating repo health operations.

It’s not perfect, quite slow sometimes, but it’s highly configurable, and solves all the issues that I am having with Time Machine.

I use it on a bunch of servers and on my personal Linux installations.

It can use an SFTP server for data storage. Right now, my data is saved on:

  1. My 4TB SSD
  2. A cloud server

I added a hook so that the cloud backup only runs if I’m not on metered Wi-Fi.

Here’s how the command for the hook looks like, in case you’re wondering:

cami@onigiri ~> which wifi-metered
/usr/local/bin/wifi-metered
cami@onigiri ~> cat /usr/local/bin/wifi-metered
#!/bin/bash
# Exits 0 if current WiFi is NOT metered, 1 if metered, 2 if unknown/no wifi.
result=$(nmcli -f GENERAL.METERED dev show \
    "$(nmcli -t -f DEVICE,TYPE,STATE dev | grep ':wifi:connected' | cut -d: -f1 | head -1)" \
    2>/dev/null)

if echo "$result" | grep -q 'METERED:.*yes'; then
    exit 1
elif echo "$result" | grep -q 'METERED:.*no'; then
    exit 0
else
    exit 2
fi

The con is that it cannot restore your desktop exactly how it used to be as seamlessly. If your laptop breaks, you’ll likely spend a few hours getting basic dotfiles in the right place for it to work.

Personally, I think the trouble when restoring is worth the simplicity when backing up.

On that same MacBook that jumped, I was running Asahi Linux, that I was backing up to my SSD.

Now, I could easily dump the filesystem and get back all the data that I had on Linux, and copy it to my ThinkPad.

I cannot say the same about the data that is on my Time Machine HDD though; I needed to jump through a few hoops to get to read the data.

It’s just not made for this. Restic/Backrest, on the other hand, made browsing the data quite easy, even at different points in time.

Backing up Android phones

I also have an Android phone. I have nothing of importance on my phone other than pictures and passwords.

A phone is a portable computer, and it’s made to be lost, broken and stolen. Yeah, it sucks to have a 1000$ device taken from you.

It sucks even more when it contains a ton of happy pictures and memories. For me, losing one year of pictures feels like losing one year of my life.

Something else is losing passwords. It’s a huge pain to reset passwords on so many websites.

The rest can go away. I don’t care about various configuration options. Losing a phone is such a rare occurrence that it’s okay if I have to spend a few hours setting up a new one. I don’t mind being logged out of my apps.

For Pixel devices, it’s possible to perform backups if you have a Google One plan.

I am not sure about other manufacturers.

I just don’t trust Google, though. Or rather, I would like to limit the amount of dependency that I have on Google as much as possible, and buying a subscription is not going on the right path.

That’s why I use Syncthing.

My passwords are stored in a simple KeePassXC file. My pictures and this KeePassXC database file get synced to a server that I have at home. I decided to mark this server at home as “untrusted”; no unencrypted data sits on it. Before the data leaves my phone to get on that server, it gets encrypted with a key, which is stored on the KeePassXC file. Needless to say, the KeePassXC file is encrypted as well.

The server at home basically acts as a temporary data store. When my laptop comes online, it starts syncing the pictures and the password files.

The passwords file goes inside the nVME drive inside my laptop, while pictures only get stored on my SSD (which is encrypted).

The pictures then get backed up to the cloud (so, there are four copies of my pictures: on my phone, on my server at home, on my SSD and on a cloud server).

To make it faster, my phone and my laptop can sync over LAN. That’s the beauty of Syncthing!

I feel good about my pictures being just files on disk. Well, I still use my iPhone for pictures sometimes, so not all of my pictures, but at least some of them!

FAQ

What if you lose everything at the same time?

What would happen if I lost all my devices at the same time?

Well, I would be out of luck. The key to the kingdom is basically that KeePassXC file, which contains the encryption password for the online backup repository.

I am still figuring this out. I see two options:

  1. Uploading my KeepassXC file somewhere with a strong encryption password.
  2. Giving my KeepassXC file to one or two friends and asking them to keep it safe for me; then asking them periodically to send it to me to prove that they are still holding on to it.

I am not perfectly satisfied with either option.

Even if the data is encrypted, I don’t like having it online in the first place. I also don’t like bothering family & friends with this.

How do you know if your Backrest backups are running well?

I am using Beeminder with Backrest hooks on snapshot success. This could be an article of its own, so I won’t talk about it too much, but basically, if the backup doesn’t run, it won’t add a datapoint, and if I don’t fix it I’ll have to pay money.

This is the approach I use for production servers, and it works really well. I can sleep easy at night knowing that my backups are not failing.

Alerting in general is a bit tough, for example, I don’t have anything that tells me if Syncthing is not synced well.

It doesn’t look like a problem right now but I’m considering implementing alerting for Syncthing as an upgrade to this system.

Isn’t that overkill?

No. Definitely not.

Conclusion

I know, right now, you have something more important to do. You’re busy, you’re tired. SSDs cost money. You’re perfect and will never break anything, and you’re very careful and nobody will steal from you.

Despite all that; think about your future self. Stuff happens all the time. You really don’t want to be in a position where you lost an expensive device and also lost priceless data.

I’ve broken, lost, and gotten my phone stolen (and stole it back, which is a story for another time).

It’s like health insurance. You can’t really feel the need for it right now. But when you really need it, you’ll be glad that you have it. (yes, I know you’re better off investing in an ETF for 40 years instead of paying for health insurance monthly).

Maybe, a quote to sum it up:

Treat your devices like cattle, not pets.