So my first caveat on this is that anybody who has had "painstakingly imported from thousands of CDs" "(since before iTunes existed)" has to have seen the festering dumpster fire that has long been Apple cloud services. My next caveat is that anybody with an iPhone has seen that Apple isn't at all transparent with your data - the snaps you take on your phone aren't image files, they're pieces of a giant f'n database that has to be parsed in and out and if you want the .jpgs you'd best also strap yourself to something less shitty like Google or Flickr. My third caveat is that the whole "fuck you, you own a U2 album" trick from last year should make it pretty clear to everybody that Apple has not and never will considered "your music" to be "your music." Finally, anybody who stores their music as .wav files is never going to be happy with itunes anything because AAC is more than good enough for the earbuds the author is listening over so methinks this is a whole bunch of righteous indignation over a service that has been demonstrably consumer-level since years before it was announced. But yeah. I'm shocked and appalled that they'd actually scrub your hard drive. I guess that's why they bid so much for Dropbox - they really don't get subversion sync. It's funny - Google has done this for years now, except they (A) don't wipe your drive (B) don't charge you for it. I've got like, a stupid amount of music in iTunes and when I went Android, I got the phat one because I thought I'd need a lot of memory for music. Nopers. I keep it all on Google and stream it as I need. T-mobile doesn't even charge me for the privilege. It's damn-near seamless. But then, Google gets data and versioning and Apple so doesn't.
Time Machine. Time Machine is an abomination. It works, and they don't bend over backwards to obfuscate it, but no one else has thought allowing hard links to directories were a good idea since SysV for a reason, and even Apple knew they were sick and wrong because OsX disallowed them like everyone else until 10.5, when they added them so Time Machine could use them. Why is that a stupid thing to do? Ask yourself what ".." means when you have multiple parent directories, and how you decide a file is no longer reachable from the root directory in the presence of cyclic links so your users disks don't fill up with files they thought they deleted without (slowly) walking the whole directory tree (this is the problem garbage collectors solve in programming languages, but disks are an order of magnitude slower than RAM and good GCs are tricky anyway). They didn't need to do the stupid thing to make versioning work, there are many backup systems (every other backup system) that don't do that. It is the kind of solution you get when you tell otherwise clever people "I want fast backups and I want them now" without giving them time to do a little research first. It is the kind of solution you get when the UX people run the show. It is what happens when you think "boutique technology" is a good idea. ... that was a bit longer than I meant it to be. I am still bitter about that one Very Bad Day doing Time Machine archeology.But then, Google gets data and versioning and Apple so doesn't.
Time machine kicks the shit out of whatever that horrible thing with the umbrella logo that came before it was. I, too, have spent a Very Bad Weekend doing Time Machine archaeology and you're right, it truly, truly sucks. But it's integrated into the OS, it's super-easy to set up, it's super-easy to work with - when it works - and when it doesn't work, Apple will happily sell you more hardware. I've got four computers talking to the Synology as a Time Machine target. It actually works pretty goddamn well. On the other hand, configuring Macrium Reflect on Windows 10 was a chore and a half. So I get what you're saying. But the fact of the matter is I've got Time Machine working across four operating systems and while I'm certain you could do it slicker and faster and lighter, I can't.
And that's of course why they're successful, because if you asked me how to handle your backups I wouldn't have an answer that didn't start "write a shell script that ..." and there are plenty of people with enough important data that "periodically make a tarball and stick it somewhere safe" isn't good enough to who "write a shell script that ..." might as well be "go fuck yourself." But building Rube Goldberg machines so your users don't have to care what's happening risks failing spectacularly for anyone doing something a little unusual, and eventually collapses under its own weight so you have to start from scratch. Which might also be good for the business, witness the frequency of new Windows versions, but is a pain in the ass for both users and developers.
This, I believe, is why Carbon Copy Cloner exists. It allows you to do "time machine" shit with a great deal of flexibility and configurability and I suspect Mike and Rob bailed on Apple when it became clear that Time Machine was going to do that one thing and that one thing only and when it stopped working Apple was going to say "oh well." Something to think about: back when I used to design AV systems for corporate boardrooms and the like, fully half our budget was in the control system. Something else to think about: for twenty years, when asked for recommendations on stereo equipment and the like, I will say "go play with a lot of them and choose the one with the remote you understand the best." It took me a while to get there. As an engineer it's annoying as fuck that "how the morons do it" matters more than "what it can do" but years of experience bears out this simple observation: If users can figure out how to do it, they'll do it. If they can't, they won't. There is no point in building functionality that users won't use, thus there is no point in making Time Machine anything other than a one-trick pony. THAT is the genius of Time Machine - it's a set'n'forget backup system that your mother can configure without consulting the Internet. It's also the downfall of Time Machine - when it stops working you have to go deep into the command line. BUT since it's "backup", and since the majority of users have none, having one that burps and dies every nine months is a vast improvement. After all, most people don't use their time machine backups at all. I've got five of them and I had to crack into one, once, in the past five years. I think that's the defining line between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook - Steve Jobs loved design, but he loved UX more. Tim Cook loves design and figures that enough skeuomorphism will channel his users into appropriate behavior.