"Time Machine" caught in a time warp?

On or about 11/7/07 2:56 AM, thus spake "David Emery" <emerygrebyn.com>:

> I hung Leopard on my original 1.25ghz/512mb Mini to get some familiarity
> with it before I mess with my work machine.
>
> Installation went OK but it took about 2 1/2 hours to complete. Then I
> hooked up my external drive, cleaned up some stuff, and triggered Time
> Machine. Time Machine copied about 25gb of 32gb, and then hung. It's
> doing -something- with the disk, but Time Machine is not reporting any
> progress. And it's really hard to kill Time Machine, clicking on the
> 'cancel' X button doesn't do anything. I did kill it, disconnect the
> external drive, hooked the drive to another machine, and ran Disk
> Warrior on the external. Then I plugged it back into the Mini and Time
> Machine launched again, got to what appears to be the same stopping
> point, and is hung...
>
> Anyone else seen this kind of behavior?

Try repartitioning the external drive, as suggested here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306932

m.

>Installation went OK but it took about 2 1/2 hours to complete. Then I
>hooked up my external drive, cleaned up some stuff, and triggered Time
>Machine. Time Machine copied about 25gb of 32gb, and then hung. It's
>doing -something- with the disk, but Time Machine is not reporting any
>progress. And it's really hard to kill Time Machine, clicking on the

A reader of my Seattle Times column had a similar experience, and
determined that the culprit was FileVault. Time Machine got hung up
writing his ginormous Home folder/FileVault image every hour. Dunno
if that's the case on your machine, but it's worth checking out.

Jeff

At 2:04 AM -0800 11/12/07, Jeff Carlson wrote:
>>Installation went OK but it took about 2 1/2 hours to complete. Then I
>>hooked up my external drive, cleaned up some stuff, and triggered Time
>>Machine. Time Machine copied about 25gb of 32gb, and then hung. It's
>>doing -something- with the disk, but Time Machine is not reporting any
>>progress. And it's really hard to kill Time Machine, clicking on the
>
>A reader of my Seattle Times column had a similar experience, and
>determined that the culprit was FileVault. Time Machine got hung up
>writing his ginormous Home folder/FileVault image every hour.

I've been wondering how Time Machine handles disk images. I store
all of my financial documents on an encrypted disk image. (and there
is another encrypted disk image for, ahem, private documents.)

In some ways it makes sense to just store the whole image, but I
think its kindof shortsited of Apple not to think of the
FileVault+Time Machine case. I've never been comfortable with the
idea of FileVault, and I prefer the control of deciding which files
are and aren't encrypted.

I'm getting the impression that Time Machine is a bit of a "trial
balloon", put something really basic out there see how people use it
and where the pain points are, then fix them. It wouldn't be the
first time they've done it.

~Nick Barnard
http://www.inmff.net

There is a lot of discussion in the forums about Time Machine struggling with large files, and also corrupting disks. After have to erase and re-partition two of mine I've gone back to just drag backups until I can get Synchronize running.

On 16 Nov 2007, at 1:53PM, Nicholas Barnard wrote:
> I'm getting the impression that Time Machine is a bit of a "trial
> balloon", put something really basic out there see how people use it
> and where the pain points are, then fix them. It wouldn't be the
> first time they've done it.

I think Time Machine is there for all the user out there who have
heard that they should back up, but have no idea how to do it. And for
those users it works wonderfully well. They just buy an external hard
disk and plug it in and say they want to use it for backups. And then
their backups happen.

It's not a "trial balloon". It's a splendid way to help 'ordinary'
users back up their data, which is becoming more and more important to
them, with email, digital cameras, and other documents that they'll
only have on computer.

regards,

Paul

On 16-Nov-2007, at 06:53, Nicholas Barnard wrote:
> I've been wondering how Time Machine handles disk images. I store
> all of my financial documents on an encrypted disk image. (and there
> is another encrypted disk image for, ahem, private documents.)

If the image is encrypted, it backs up the entire image if anything
changes. This is right, because it has no way of checking the
contents of it. If the image is UNencrypted, it should backup the
changes only, but I believe it is still backing up the whole image at
this point.

> I'm getting the impression that Time Machine is a bit of a "trial
> balloon", put something really basic out there see how people use it
> and where the pain points are, then fix them. It wouldn't be the
> first time they've done it.

Time Machine is "Backups for the rest of us" meaning, generally
speaking, not the types who have encrypted images of files sitting
around, those types of users are, arguably, most likely to already
have their backup schemes in place.

I don't expect that specific 'flaw' to be fixed. The changes I expect
to see soon for TM are:

* Support for airport disks
* Support for other network storage
* Support for multiple backup drives

On Nov 17, 2007, at 4:03 AM, LewisGmail wrote:

> The changes I expect
> to see soon for TM are:
>
> * Support for airport disks

Probably. If it can be made to work, which seems to have been the
problem that caused it to disappear very much at the last minute.

>
> * Support for other network storage

Less certain. The file system to which the backup is being made needs
to support hard linked directories (or it will fill up much faster
than what is happening with attached HFS+ disks). Or support some
alternative. ZFS is lurking, but not for "soon".

   --John

johnbaxterlistsmac.com wrote:
>
> On Nov 17, 2007, at 4:03 AM, LewisGmail wrote:
>>
>> * Support for other network storage
>
> Less certain. The file system to which the backup is being made needs
> to support hard linked directories (or it will fill up much faster
> than what is happening with attached HFS+ disks). Or support some
> alternative. ZFS is lurking, but not for "soon".

I'm backing up two G4 Powerbooks to a drive attached to an Intel iMac,
and what it does is use sparse disk images for the Powerbooks. They get
mounted as needed and unmounted when backupd is finished. Provided that
they can do the same on a networked drive, I can't see any fundamental
problems. If you can use an HFS+ filesystem on a networked drive, I
don't see why it wouldn't work now.

I'll soon find out, when I back up my Powerbook on another drive and
reformat it HFS+ case sensitive, whether using the iMac attached drive
(HFS+, case preserving) will still work. Time Machine wouldn't let the
HFS+ case sensitive primary drive on my G5 be backed up on the other
internal drive (then case preserving, but I've since remedied that).
Now both internal drives back up to a case sensitive Firewire drive.

--
Paul Schinder
schinderpobox.com