OrbStack is great in a lot of ways, and I universally prefer it over Docker for Mac.
That being said, it wasn't always been smooth sailing. Under the hood, OrbStack uses an 8TB sparse disk image, which doesn't play nice with most backup software.
It caused me problems with Backblaze, but the Github issues for this show that it also breaks all sorts of backup software, including tarsnap, Druva inSync, Carbon Cloner, iDrive, Carbonite, and even Time Machine itself when formatted with HFS+, apparently.
The official position for a year was "won't fix", because it's an Apple technology, and backup software should support that. While technically correct, realistically, sparse image backup support was not very widespread at the time. (I have no idea about now, since I gave up trying to back up my Orbstack image with my whole disk backup.)
I like Orbstack, but I wish the devs had moved to exclude the disk image from backups immediately, instead of arguing with people about it for a year first.
All that being said, I do still like OrbStack a lot, and I hope to never see a repeat of this problem and how it was handled.
The first reply on the issue you linked seems incredibly professional and well handled, and even recommends excluding the file from backups, I can't see a single issue there.
Being polite is not quite the same thing as being handled professionally, and definitely not the same thing as handling it correctly.
Telling people to exclude the file from backup came too late for many. E.g., Time Machine users with older disks formatted with HFS+ would find their drives crashed/corrupted/wiped, and lost all their backups. Only afterwards would they start googling to see what happened. (Even now, the relevant FAQ still says "Time Machine supports them, so your backups will not be affected" which is not always correct.)
From the time the issue was opened, to the time they said they admitted they were wrong and excluded the Orbstack image from backups by default, was 13 months. Even if other solutions were on the table, the professional thing to do would have been to exclude the images ASAP, so customers weren't at risk of data loss, and then work on alternatives afterwards.
That being said, it wasn't always been smooth sailing. Under the hood, OrbStack uses an 8TB sparse disk image, which doesn't play nice with most backup software.
https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/29
It caused me problems with Backblaze, but the Github issues for this show that it also breaks all sorts of backup software, including tarsnap, Druva inSync, Carbon Cloner, iDrive, Carbonite, and even Time Machine itself when formatted with HFS+, apparently.
The official position for a year was "won't fix", because it's an Apple technology, and backup software should support that. While technically correct, realistically, sparse image backup support was not very widespread at the time. (I have no idea about now, since I gave up trying to back up my Orbstack image with my whole disk backup.)
I like Orbstack, but I wish the devs had moved to exclude the disk image from backups immediately, instead of arguing with people about it for a year first.
All that being said, I do still like OrbStack a lot, and I hope to never see a repeat of this problem and how it was handled.