General Time Machine Problems

I am still running Mojave for “reasons”.

The other day I needed to find an old document that I knew I had on my internal boot hard drive, it had been there for quite some time. But then in a burst of house cleaning, I trashed it. Several days later I went to look for it on my “Time Machine” external SSD.

This is the first time I actually needed time machine, so I fired it it up. Man that was a horrible and disappointing experience. Search took forever. Every time I looked in a different place it felt like time machine was indexing all over again, (don’t know if that is true, but it felt like it).

After about an hour of looking, I gave up. Went to my online backup, and boom in seconds I found it. Then, just for giggles, I went to my “clone” external drive. and yep there was a copy there also.

My question:
If I have a clone, (using SuperDuper), and an online backup, (Backblaze) … And that Time Machine is so slow and nearly imposable to use. Why even use Time Machine at all?

Has Time Machine always been this slow and chunky?

This was one of the worse experiences I have had with a piece of Apple software.

Time Machine is often pretty slow and clunky to navigate because it has to recreate the disk structures from all the hard links it uses. My approach has always been to go to the enclosing folder that holds the file or folder I want to recover in the Finder first, and then enter Time Machine. That way there’s minimal navigation within Time Machine itself.

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