The indoctrination of windows is extreme. Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.
And yet... linux is hard, and users decry RTFM as "not growing the userbase"
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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I mean, this is why I have been using Mac since 1984. It's not hard and it pretty much just gets out of the way and lets you do stuff. (Caveat: Gaming. It really doesn't let you do gaming without jumping through a number of hoops.)
The fact Time Machine immediately hassles you to set up a drive and back up your stuff is so great for the average user. I'm sure both Linux and (I know) Windows have something similar, but it's not immediately active and trying to get you to save your stuff. TM has saved my bacon numerous times and I love that it's one click and a fresh HD for users to get it set up.
Funnily enough, Microsoft does try to do this with OneDrive, prompting you during OOBE. A lot of the tech space demonizes Microsoft for exactly this.
Which to be fair, a lot of that does come down to legitimate concerns (such as being far to eager about this even when you say "No" and not offering a "don't ask me again") - but at the same time, some of the push (likely) comes from a good place of trying to set up backups for users.
It's definitely not completely altruistic - companies hardly ever are (cough cough, forced online accounts). But I also don't think it's as black and white as "Microsoft is bad for this". And though even I complain about this, the same goes for Microsoft being aggressive with Windows Updates.
AFAIK, OneDrive is very different from Time Machine? More similar to iCloud? It's not a backup, it's just an online sync.
The MS equivalent of Time Machine is File History, I believe. (Ie, a versioned backup that fills the hard drive until it's out of space and then starts deleting the oldest copies of files.)
OneDrive does offer restoration of individual file versions or even the entire OneDrive contents (for things like ransomware attacks). Details are here
I think OneDrive is a pretty good (but paid) backup utility especially for non-technical people. There are a lot of things that I could nitpick on, but for some of the older people (octogenarians) that I am the family support for, I set it up and anytime I interact with their computer I click on OneDrive to ensure it is replicating. I very occasionally have seen a single file not replicating, but never have I seen it fail completely. These people previous had NO backups of any kind.
I use it myself as an additional backup location, but not in the way most people would.
Yeah, I just meant that I think that you can't roll back to a version 3 weeks ago kind of thing, which is what Time Machine and File History do. Synchronization vs a true versioned backup.
You absolutely can roll back to previous versions using the steps in those links. I believe it has a 30 day limit, but that is pretty good for a consumer product.
Ah, perhaps that's what I'm missing. I do have a Windows install for playing the odd games every now and then that don't support Linux, but I don't actually back anything up since all of my games are via Steam and utilize Steam's cloud saves for syncing (and these games are usually multiplayer online-only games and wouldn't need syncing anyways). I know that when I originally used macOS (back during "Mountain Lion" I believe?) Time Machine did utilize an external disk, but I would've thought these days it also leveraged iCloud Drive.
I did know about Windows' File History mechanism, but I also made the assumption that Windows tech would integrate with OneDrive since they're made by the same company... doing a quick search though seems to indicate that it "should" be possible, but actually getting it to do so definitely doesn't have a simple toggle like you'd expect.
That's what I get for speaking about features I've not used myself, whoops!
In some ways it's just a technical difference (syncing vs backup "snapshots"). It's totally true that if you throw away a file out of iCloud or OneDrive, there is (I believe) a window of opportunity to get it back out of the cloud.
But I also don't think either let you get back a version from 3 weeks ago, for example, which is where versioned backups like Time Machine and File History come in.
Honestly, it is good to have both enabled for various reasons, not the least of which is just having a copy of your files offsite.