Undo mass processing by smart rule

I was thinking “what happens if a snapshot is taken while 3000 files are moved and renamed”? But you’re probably right: there would be one snapshot before all that, one in the middle and one afterwards. One would just have to restore the one that should be kept.

Agreed

And as for filling up the hard drive, that’s the point of letting the user determine the frequency of snapshots and how many to retain. The snapshots thus could be tweaked to reflect the type of database operations the user does and to reflect the speed and capacity of available storage space on the computer.

Related issue - I plan this for a separate post at some point with more details, but I have recently concluded that on the scale of “large” databases and/or large hard drives (for me about 200Gb of databases on an 8Tb drive with 2.5 Tb of total content) Time Machine simply does not scale. I just disabled Time Machine this week and switched to Carbon Copy Cloner for my local backups (continuing Arq for cloud backups) and I am much happier with its performance. Time Machine is not user configurable enough and feature-rich enough to work on this scale.

The Apple story: easy for the average user. A pain for anybody with advanced requirements.

I recall someone said that you are supposed to use any of backup techs at hand for these purposes. DT’s backup is not about saving contents of data, - it is about saving database structure and integrity.
Or @BLUEFROG’s written about it in the manual somewhere…

that’s the point of letting the user determine the frequency of snapshots and how many to retain. The snapshots thus could be tweaked to reflect the type of database operations the user does and to reflect the speed and capacity of available storage space on the computer.

This was previously an option in DEVONthink 2.x’s Preferences > Backup but…

  1. It confused people into thinking there were file backups being performed.

  2. Some people would not set reasonable maximums and bloated their databases with excess and unnecessary backup data, e.g., people set it to Hourly with 24 backups.

PS: Creating a snapshot is no trivial matter and it would have to be a proper snapshot to account for potential actions to be undone, not merely undoing a file renaming problem.

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Depends on point of view. MacOS is a great combination of simple UI with all the power of a Linux-like OS under the hood.

Re. Time Machine, it basically uses standard OS features and uses hard-links to create snapshots. The beauty of it is that it’s technically open and fully accessible with basic Linux console know-how (handy if the TM drive is on a NAS).
The downside is that for scenarios like a DB where a couple of blocks get changed in a 100MB file means the whole file is copied again. Other software may store block-level deltas in a proprietary format. A TM-based solution here could be to exclude the DB from TM and have an own backup strategy for it, or have the DB spit out change logs for TM to back up.

Firstly, I’m of course using Mac OS and do like it. Most of the time. Before that, I used Linux and hated the GUI most of the time. However, Mac OS dies not have Linux-like power IMHO. There’s no package management, eg. You have to go for Homebrew or something like that or install from source. There’s no filesystem standard describing where additional installs go. Setting up simple things like a lamp stack are a pain ITA, and every major OS upgrade changes something under the hood that breaks your lamp stack. Automation is bad and getting worse with every release: AppleScript is a dead horse, JXA abandoned by Apple and even their own apps lack automation functions. Major utilities like see work differently then in Linux and are are behind (like the just abandoned bash).
One can use a Mac for development instead of MacOS, not because of it. The GUI is still one of the best out there. But don’t compare it against older Apple standards. Why does Apple mail not have a share function?
But that has nothing to do with DT, so let’s take that private, if need be.

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I didn’t meant it the other way around, from a Windows perspective. I meant the OS is linux-like, not the power. As in “all the power of a decent OS underneath that is very linux-like”.
If I don’t trust spotlight’s results I can drop down and do a find / grep. I can natively trawl time machine’s backups on my NAS. I can use Git natively on the command line, that sort of stuff. Many people don’t realise that Mac is very techie-friendly in that way.
But yeah it’s drifting off topic so let’s leave it at that :slight_smile:

I use Bookmacster for syncing bookmarks between browsers. You can set a limit on the number of changes it can make before it tells you you have exceeded your safe number of changes (I set it to 25) and asks you if you are sure you want to make 3000 changes! It does catch costly slips.