Is there a good version of Time Machine?

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Feb 29, 2016, at 9:24 PM, Ludwig <macports at metaspasm.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 29 Feb 2016, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> Backups to a non-Apple network-attached storage (NAS) device that claims to
>> have Time Machine support will become corrupted over time, with the
>> likelihood increasing greatly if backups are attempted over wireless. I have
>> used this for years, and have had to start my backup over from scratch after
>> Time Machine declared it corrupted more times than I can recall. Non-Apple
>> implementations of AFP (i.e. netatalk) are simply not sufficiently compatible
>> with Apple's implementation to work reliably with Time Machine, no matter
>> what the third-party vendor trying to sell it to you says.
>> 
> 
> Does TM detect corruption “on the fly” or does one not find out until
> attempting to restore?

If your Time Machine backups are to a network location like an Apple Time Capsule, every month or so, Time Machine will verify your backups prior to doing a backup, and if they are corrupted, it will display a dialog box letting you know, and letting you delete the backups and start a new one. You can also manually verify your network Time Machine backups anytime by holding down the Option key while pulling down the Time Machine menu in the menubar and selecting Verify Backups.

Apple does not allow you to verify Time Machine backups stored on a local disk. I presume this is because they cannot become corrupted in the ways that the verification checks for.