What I Don't Like About Time Machine

Quoting John Ferman <jwfermanties2.net>:

> Time Machine is a nice concept, but it is overkill. It backs up
> periodically whether any files have changed or not, which is useful to
> those who are producing on the computer constantly and heavily.


Actually . . . Time Machine's hourly backup only does changed files.
If you look at your destination drive it will appear that say the
Chess game has been backed up every hour; but Time Machine uses
something called hard links, which are similar to aliases.

Chess is copied on the original backup; then next hour a hard link to
Chess is put in the 'next hour' backup so that it appears that you
have a complete backup of everything every hour. It's all the same
copy of Chess though, just with hard links pointing to it.

If your supposition were correct . . . the backup drive would fill up
in just a few days with 24 copies pe day of say the Office 08 folder
which is 400 megs or so . . . you would have about 12 GB per day just
of Office files. In addition, backups over wireless would simply never
finish.

Does is matter whether you have a hard drive that's USB2 or Firewire?
Derek (UK)

--On 3/18/2008 12:58 AM -0700 John Ferman wrote:

> Time Machine is a nice concept, but it is overkill. It backs up
> periodically whether any files have changed or not, which is useful to
> those who are producing on the computer constantly and heavily.
> However, if one is a more casual user of their computer, that level of
> repetition is unnecessary.

Sounds to me like you don't understand Time Machine. TM uses a feature
called "hard links", so that while it _appears_ that an unchanging file is
backed up every hour or week, in fact all those backups point to a single
copy of the file on your Time Machine drive.

If you never change the "Chess" application--to use your example--then your
TM backup has a SINGLE copy of "Chess", which is linked to every backup
point (since at every backup point the file existed in the same unchanged
format.)

Dave Scocca

On 3/18/08 3:58 AM, "John Ferman" <jwfermanties2.net> wrote:

> I
> would hope that Apple would modify TM so that the user has much
> greater control. Rant over.

Agreed but, until Apple does what seems perfectly logical, you can use this
app to better manage the timing of your Time Machine backups:
TimeMachineScheduler
<http://www.klieme.com/TimeMachineScheduler.html>
--
Shawn King

> Agreed but, until Apple does what seems perfectly logical, you can
> use this
> app to better manage the timing of your Time Machine backups:
> TimeMachineScheduler

There is another product out there that does give greater control to
the user: it is Synchronize X Plus put out by www.qdea.com. I haven't
checked lately, but I suppose they are still in business.

On 3/18/08 at 4:01 PM, shawnyourmaclifeshow.com (Shawn King) wrote:

>On 3/18/08 3:58 AM, "John Ferman" <jwfermanties2.net> wrote:
>
>>I
>>would hope that Apple would modify TM so that the user has much
>>greater control. Rant over.
>
>Agreed but, until Apple does what seems perfectly logical, you can use this
>app to better manage the timing of your Time Machine backups:
>TimeMachineScheduler

I think you're missing the point of Time Machine. Time Machine
is designed as set-and-forget backup for people who don't
currently use backup. While I think it's still usable for people
with a higher level of experience and more sophisticated backup
usage, by design it *should* be biased towards preventing people
without backup-savvy from making common screw-ups.

For example, the extensive overview of Time Machine I read a
couple of days ago criticized it because the interface for
specifying folders to back up was 'backwards' - instead of
choosing folders you want to back up, you choose folders to
exclude. While it's all well and good for someone who really
knows what he's doing to pick and choose what they want to back
up, this is exactly the *wrong* tack for the non-backup-savvy
users Time Machine is designed for. How many people know where
the Address Book data is stored, so they make sure it gets
backed up? How about e-mails? iCal appointments? I talked about
this in a thread here a couple of years ago, complaining about
what 'obvious and clear' locations might be used to store things
like this in the system, and things have not improved since
then. Under the current conditions, expecting users to have to
choose what folders they want to include in a backup is Wrong;
while it's not perfect, the closest to a 'right' choice is what
Time Machine does, which is to backup everything unless the user
knows what a folder is and is sure that he doesn't want to back
it up. Safety is and should be the default.

In the case here - yeah, more savvy users might have specific,
legitimate reasons why they don't want a backup run every hour.
But for the vast majority of users, it does no significant harm
(an incremental backup typically takes 15-20 seconds for me; I
almost never notice it). And if setting the interval was obvious
and simple, I can easily see misconceptions like the original
poster's leading to them setting an interval much longer than
what they should.

Travis Butler
tbutlermac.com

On Mar 20, 2008, at 09:42, John Ferman wrote:

>> TimeMachineScheduler
>
> There is another product out there that does give greater control to
> the user: it is Synchronize X Plus put out by www.qdea.com. I haven't
> checked lately, but I suppose they are still in business.


This is also a nice alternative (as is SuperDuper) but Time Machine
has the advantage of doing versioning so you can get back yesterday's
version of the file. If all you want to do is change the backup
frequency to something other than an hour . . .there is a tip on
macosxhints.com about how to do this.

On 2008-03-18 13:55:33 -0700, Derek <derekcross1.co.uk> said:

> Does is matter whether you have a hard drive that's USB2 or Firewire?
> Derek (UK)

In principle, no, but I've found that some FireWire drives and Leopard
don't play nicely together, resulting in system hangs, disk corruption,
and data loss.

--On March 21, 2008 4:22:47 PM -0700 Conrad Hirano
<tidbitshirano.fastmail.fm> wrote:

> On 2008-03-18 13:55:33 -0700, Derek <derekcross1.co.uk> said:
>
>> Does is matter whether you have a hard drive that's USB2 or Firewire?
>> Derek (UK)
>
> In principle, no, but I've found that some FireWire drives and Leopard
> don't play nicely together, resulting in system hangs, disk corruption,
> and data loss.

You have a hardware problem. Either a bad cable, firewire enclosure or a
bad drive, maybe a bad firewire on the mac. I'd guess bad drive. I've got
firewire drives and DVD drives on my mini with nary a problem. The System
has been on semi-continuously (no downtime longer than the occasional
reboot) since Leopard came out and I've had no hangs, disk corruption or
data loss.

If this were common there would be screaming on the Internet heard around
the world.

I've found firewire works MUCH better than USB. Better sustained
throughput rates, less problems using mulitple devices at a time, etc....

On Mar 23, 2008, at 4:13 AM, Kevin van Haaren wrote:
>
> You have a hardware problem. Either a bad cable, firewire enclosure
> or a
> bad drive, maybe a bad firewire on the mac. I'd guess bad drive.
> I've got
> firewire drives and DVD drives on my mini with nary a problem. The
> System
> has been on semi-continuously (no downtime longer than the occasional
> reboot) since Leopard came out and I've had no hangs, disk
> corruption or
> data loss.

That's what I initially thought too since, like you, I have drives
that work perfectly fine with Leopard. But I have a drive that works
on my iMac but fails on another, and a friend has a drive that
eventually hung all three system running Leopard I tried it on. Yet
both drives worked perfectly with Tiger. Of course, it could be just
coincidence that these drives from separate systems both failed in the
same way right after upgrading to Leopard; however, there are threads
in the Apple discussion forums filled with posts from users who
experienced the same or similar disk problems under Leopard.

That said, I don't think it's a common problem. Even with the flakiest
drive, my iMac would often run fine for days before any problems
cropped up. Most people, I suspect, won't ever see it, but I'm
convinced the problem lies in Leopard's FireWire drivers.