I was planning to leave my appraisal of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's Time Machine feature until the end, but necessity has just forced me to look at it in depth straight away. Put simply, if it wasn't for Time Machine, you wouldn't be reading this article.
Earlier today, I experienced one of about three kernel panics I've encountered …
I don't know anything about Macs or TM, but about "rsync/rsnapshot/find/dd" & stuff, yes.
So whenever I read someone saying "It took me about N minutes to cron up stuff to do stuff" I wanna hurl pizza bigtime. Anyone who "takes about 8 minutes" to do that sort of thing either:
1) has done sysadmin tasks over the past 3 years and can read follow his own how-to's painstakingly written down in his own wiki
or:
a) is a wild-blue-eyed believer in his powers to understand non-trivial command line invocations of potentially misbehaving software and
b) is talking out of his ass and
c) has not run any backup/restore tests
and thus needs to be driven away from complex machinery with a rubber hose.
regarding your problems... "I found this because, guess what, it doesn't work for me with my G5 PowerMac and (brand new) Western Digital My Book combo. The backup just craps out with some unknown error and never gets to complete."
Make sure that the disk is partitioned using either the Apple Partition Map or GUID (required for intel) rather than the "Master Book Record" that I believe My Books are by default.
System profiler will show you the format quickly, and Disk Utility will let you (destructively) re-partition.
>Gee, for just the price of buying an extra device you can make use of a backup feature. Lovely.
>Why not just have a RAID 1 system in the first place if you're going to run two drives?
------
I think you were so eager to bash Apple here that you completely missed the point of what a backup system even does. Backing up your files onto the same hard drive is kinda pointless, isn't it?
As for running RAID 1 - on a desktop, maybe. And the user can do that if they desire - OS X supports it. But what about the laptop user who is now forced to drag their external drive round with them? Sure RAID can work with only one of the drives present, but when you unhook the other, the RAID has to be rebuilt when it is reconnected. Since the rebuild process is basically synchronising the two drives... a backup of sorts.
Time Machine, on the other hand, stores incremental copies on the external drive and provides a very easy to use and intuitive interface to browse them with. This is in the true Apple fashion - sometimes they are not the first to offer that kind of software (let's face it, backup software has been around for a long while) - but they are often the first to make it usable by the average person. I'm not talking one of us - but the average person who wouldn't know how to do a backup otherwise, or use a computer. The kind of person who wouldn't understand a shell script to do the same thing that many others on here are claiming to be just as good.
I used boot-camp to create a partition which I then reformatted and set up as a time machine partition. It won't protect me against hard drive failure but it does protect against accidental file deletions and application bugs. You need about 110% of the size of the data you expect to backup.
A step in the right direction, but the backup needs to improve.
They just need to add the ability to do a full disc/partition image to any system device while the OS is running.
On the PC I keep my personal data and OS on separate partitions, and backup my OS with True Image while windows is running.
I can restore using a boot CD and it always works.
I used retrospect to backup my documents. There you want to keep track of multiple file versions....
Both types of backup are needed.
Also RAID 1 is hardware redundancy not backup. I have my documents on a RAID 1 array, but that won't help if I screw up my financial spreadsheet and need to consult last weeks version.
Of course I use True Image and Retrospect which didn't come free with my OS.
Anyway step in the right direction for OSX they just need to get the bugs out and add some live drive imaging options to the mix.
rsync compares checksums on every file that may have been updated. i.e. it needs to open every single file that isn't obviously different, both on the source and the target disk.
Time Machine uses Leopard's FS Event facility to record changes to the file system (at the directory level), meaning that when the time comes to perform the backup, where is much less work to be done. As per the Ars Technica review: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14
What caused the problem in the reviewer's case was that the backed up copy was damaged too, because it was taken from an already damaged system. And the backup software didn't notice it, or suggested an older restore point.
What he did, was first trying the same thing as the last good configuration option for xp. It didn't work, tried it again, failed again. Then he tried the reinstall, except winxp doesn't need an external drive and can restore the system while keeping all the data in place. Most winxp users use the first feature without being aware of it because the system restore function does this exactly, and most of the time automatically after a crash or power failiure. Non professional winxp users mostly notice the longer load time, but that's all. Turning on the /SOS kernel switch makes windows boot like a linux box, with all the info scrolling on the screen. This way users can see the system restore in action.
The final solution was to reinstall and copy over the data, which is the 2nd option on the cd for system recovery and windows still does this in place. Windows also has the option to back up to any place, including a spare disk or partition inside the machine, an external drive or to a network storage. This backup function was present in older versions, afaik it was even included in the dos tools package. (win9x even had a gui version of it)
ps:
One of my friends usually turn off his system by stomping on the switch on the power strip. His system is doing an automated recovery almost on every boot and he didn't even notice it for years.
OK. These backups to an external drive are all fine and dandy if your system gets screwed, but what about if someone steals your machine? (and they would probably not be kind enough to leave the external drive behind).
I don't know why I'm bothering writing this as you'd have to be really sad/bored to get down through the 58 other lame comments about how you CAN force a backup, but hey.
Other likely cause is a fire in your house.
I'd like to be able to get my Mac to backup to the external drive connected to my XP machine, which is out in the garage. Anyone know how I can do that easily? Enough with the talking to myself already.
Actually, if you'd been paying attention you would have seen that the "find" script is designed to run every 5 minutes, not every hour. Personally, I find this to be the sort of time interval I need when working on most projects - designs, text, or programming. It can be (and is, in practice) tuned to ignore things like swapfiles and the various working files and directories that some programs create while open, but I cut that out for clarity.
And, as I also said, the example 1-line of code is in use on my Linux machines and several MACS (slightly modified to handle the different version of "cp" on the Mac) and has been for years. This is not a theoretical script. It works just dandy, partly because the time interval is so short that things tend to be in the system cache.
I suspect that you haven't thought through what Time Machine actually does in the background. It almost certainly isn't tagging every single file on the system for a notification otherwise bootup would take a very long time.
It's probably tagging one or two levels of directories and then, when they're listed as having changed, running a process on those directories to find the specific files. A process very like "find", in fact.
I got half way though the comments and just lost the will to read any further.
The reviewer didnt give 10.5 95% he gave time Machine 95%!
This looks like a hardware issue not a software issue, I would say his hard drive is screwed.
Time Machine worked as advertised, was simple to use, had a nice (if some what cheesy) interface.
I felt the review was honest and forth comming, he didnt have to mention the two failures, I personally would have gone stright for the reformat option anyway.
10.5 has issues, wow what a surprise please excuse me while my little fantasy of perfect programmers at Apple disintergrates into dust, I will need to find a dark room to have a cry in for 5minutes.
I think 3 Kernal panics in 7 years is a good record, I wonder how many times in the last year my win2000 box has failed to boot (which i think is a hardware issue not software) and how many times it has hung or crashed? I think I would put that at something like 3 times a week.
Guess what, I will be getting a Mac in the new year. I wont be upgrading my win2000 machine to Vista, MS should give up on polishing its turd.
Just as an aside, I wonder what kind of spec machine you need to make shadow copy and aero work in a smooth usuable manner?
"I'd like to be able to get my Mac to backup to the external drive connected to my XP machine, which is out in the garage. Anyone know how I can do that easily?"
Could you not mount the XP's drive as a Samba/Windows/WhateverItsCalledThisWeek share and set Time Machine (or whatever you use) to back up to that?
I tried all those things - freshly partitioned with and without GUID, mounted the disk alternately via Firewire and USB2, disabled Bluetooth, renamed my machine without apostrophes or spaces.
So far, no joy.
So it looks like Time Machine is a nifty (but for me, unusable) technology. If I get it going I'll let you know.
Chris, I did suspect that that might be the case, although the 'until the disk is full' bit is a little misleading. The machine in question isn't on all the time, or indeed doing much at the moment so I won't be able to test it much but we'll see how it goes.
Three hours to restore a flaky hard-drive on a consumer machine using the generalised, vendor default configuration is astonishing. I don't find the two false starts difficult to believe: if there is a dodgy super-block record or some other system level data error, the disc may be OK but the file system may be corrupt and a fresh install will be the fastest way to reliably recover.
This wasn't a restore of a single file on a working system, this was a restore of a complete working system on a corrupted hard drive.
For what it is worth: creating multiple links/names of directories by privileged processes is part of the original Unix specification and were necessary before the rename(2) system call was introduced They were used to rename directories and the reason mv(1) was suid root. Solaris still allows privileged processes to create links to directories and Mac OS has simply re-enabled the feature.
I've been doing it for years. rsync to an rsync server, then ln back in time, so that you have multiple revisions of your files without taking up more space. Or use CVS/SVN/WebDAV/whatever you want.
Sorted.
I am a professional sysadmin. Your mother probably isn't (and most of the Anonymous Cowards here don't seem to be either), though she (and you) can use Time Machine. The point isn't whether or not it's possible, it's how easy it is to use. If you don't need to use Time Machine then don't. You don't have to pay for it either, you can run Linux, be happy, and shut up. The Time Machine fans are fans because they can spend more time doing things they want to do instead of writing backup scripts.
And as for RAID 1, yeah, go ahead, run that. Then delete an important file by mistake (and don't say you never have) and cry. It's not a backup.
I am fairly sure that the reviewer's problem was caused by time machine. I solved the same problem much more easily. I ran disk warrior (now that really is a one stop piece of software for mac owners) and deactivated Time Machine. Time machine seemed to have damaged the directory and altered the permissions (prior to running time machine, everything had been 100% ok according to both the disc utility and disk warrior).
My advice - deactivate time machine and use some other software (super duper, for example when shirt pocket have finalised their Leopard version or the software supplied by La Cie if you have one of their drives. Also, purchase Disk Warrior anyway.
P.S I actually like the cheesy presentation though.
But making it accessable to everyone is. If a backup is seamless and effortless, more people are likely to use it, and if its easy to restore, thats a bonus.
as for people saying "Oh wow, one mac failed, all must be bad"... Grow up. One mac failed = one mac failed. Still a better reliability rate than the 'Doze. Bringing the strength and security of Unix to the Everyman should me commended.
Just sounds like Volume Shadow Copy, which has been in Windows for several years. Easy enough to set up something simlar manually with scheduled robocopy jobs as well.
Yes it is. Buy Linux Server Hacks and type in the code to get minimised daily backups going back as far as you want to spend storage on it;It's less than one page of a5. For the shorter term backups use the 1-liner cronjob above.
Is that hard?
If by "hard" you mean "on a par with moving the mouse" then, yes, a bit. But if you mean "on a par with editing a playlist in iTunes" then, no, its not really.
Just because your mother's never tried to learn something does not mean that she'd find it difficult. Don't assume users are morons until they confirm it - especially if they happen to be your mother!
The Xerox windows system that gave birth to the windows systems at Apple and Microsoft told a great fat lie: point and grunt makes everything easy and by extension if you can't do it with a mouse then it must be rocket science for the high priests to handle. This just isn't the case. If you conquered your fear of simple commands like "find" and "ln" you would discover that they are EASIER than the silly GUI versions, and what's more, they're already there on your Mac and you can make them do things without having to wait for Steve to bump them up his personal priority list.
Well, anyway, I'm sure you're never going to try thinking outside the little box with the fruit gums stuck on it, so forget I said anything: Time Machine is clearly a perfect solution for everyone who owns a computer and doesn't want to use it to its fullest capacity. Apple Mac - the world's most stylish room heaters.
So your mum, Mrs Coward, has a copy of "Linux Server Hacks" to hand does she?
Taking your arguments to their logical conclusion, we don't really need a GUI at all. Not just us techies, you mean nobody needs one. Sounds very much like 1983 to me.
Honestly, I am well acquainted with find and ln on a professional basis and I *could* use them to rustle up some homebrew backup, but guess what - I can't be arsed.
I know how my car engine works for that matter, but I have no intention of interacting with it using spanners. I just turn the key and go places - and if it breaks for some reason I take it to somewhere where they fix that stuff and give them some money. Life's too short.
I reckon loads of us are dying to hear about the slick user-friendly apps that you develop, on room heaters or indeed any other computer. Seriously.
I had two kernal panics on my MacBook Pro since I purchased it (6 mos ago). It's highly recommended that you have the hard drive completely replaced (Apple Store only informed of this after it happened the _second_ time). I started using an online backup service (Mozy) and then backing up my MacBook to the same external as my other home PC via a free utility from Lacie called SilverKeeper. That way everything from both computers is on the external HD and it's all backed up online to Mozy every night at 2am. My next idea is to use Time Machine and then back the Time Machine HD up to the external and hence to the web via Mozy as well - it's always a good idea to keep your backups elsewhere!
I'm glad I queued up on the launch day for the sheer occassion of it all. That I wanted to pick up a multi-user version of Leopard was a by-product. Had it been cheaper on Amazon, perhaps I'd have merely been an onlooker that day but that's besides the point . . .
Am I happy with Leopard, is the question a lot of Mac users are asking. A lot will lie to themselves with their answer. I'm not UNhappy, but I'm not sure I wasn't happier with 10.4.10 - don't get me wrong, it's doing what I want it to do and Time Machine is lovely. But, like anything, there are niggles with it being a new operating system. Some are due to incompatible software (Skype 2.6.0.151 anyone???) whilst others are simply learning curves for the user - try doing a CTRL-Right Arrow within Excel to reach the end of the data range whilst Spaces is active!
The fact is, Leopard is going to be better when it reaches 10.5.2 and whether you upgrade now or later is simply down to one question . . . do you want to go through a little bit of an uncomfortable patch to be one step ahead of the game in three months time?
I've upgraded two of our three Macs . . . the MacBook Pro is staying on Tiger for now, thank you very much! Best of both worlds for me!
Firstly: I love you all, thank you for replying. It's been a joyous read and my weekend starts with a light heart. Secondly TM is something my grandmother would use before I could explain the word "backup" to her. There. Okay, so this fine gentleman had problems with his complete installation. Well, poor him. Teaches him to install a dot-zero release. Pah!
Why is it that only ONE person in all the above comments is capable of seeing what the initial problem is likely to have been ?
Yes, the restore failed first time around - could it perhaps be that the crash that made the machine unbootable had been caused by a damaged system file BEFORE the last backup ? As for the second attempt, well same problem, so same result. What do we conclude ? Well if you backup a damaged file, you'll end up with a copy of a damaged file !
Doing a fresh install and restore user data from backup would have put fresh copies of the system files on the machine and dealt with that problem.
Now, to all those "I could do that with a one-line rsync command" trolls - no you couldn't ! If you think you could then you need to find somewhere that sells clues, could you haven't got one ! Yes, you can use rsync to make ONE copy of the LATEST version, but a one liner to make a series of backups, all individually accessible, and all hard-linked together - pull the other one. That's the thing about TM, it makes MULTIPLE BACKUPS, each one of which is a complete backup in it's own right. Yes you CAN do it with rsync, but you'll need some scripting to manage the multiple versions etc - and it will be as slow as treacle as it searches the whole hard disk every time. Yes I DO know rsync, I use it extensively.
Does Windows shadow copy (or whatever) REALLY do that, or just keep n-versions of each file in a big heap ? And does it do it on separate disk so your files are still available when the disk dies ?
PS - Unix has had hard links for as long as I can remember, but HFS+ doesn't - that's why they've had to modify the file system to support TM.
PPS - And the reason for not supporting network storage ? Probably because very few network storage appliances will have the fidelity of file metadata to store the system files in a manner that the system could be faithfully restored from the backup. Given this, it's a lot easier to say "no network drives" that to say "only network drives supporting x, y, and z features" that will simply confuse most consumers.
"To help make protecting your files as convenient as possible, with Automatic Backup, you can back up your files to an external hard drive, secondary hard drive, writable CD or DVD, or to a network location. Best of all, Windows Vista will automatically make backups of your data on the schedule that you set, so you never have to worry about forgetting to back up your work.
Previously backed-up versions of files use only a bare minimum of disk space. If only a small part of a file changes (such as one slide in a presentation), only that portion gets tracked and saved.
Of course, backup is only as useful as the process you use to recover your work, and Windows Vista makes this a cinch. A recovery wizard helps you select the files or folders you want to restore and prompts you for the backup storage medium you used. Then it restores your files.
By the way, if you've accidentally written over a file, say saving an older version of a report you're writing over the top of a newer version, then the Shadow Copy feature can help you recover a prior version of that file."
This is identical to Time Machine - the difference is purely that Vista is a touch more complicated to setup. It's wizard based and there's no techy options, and it obviously gives greater flexibility regarding location. (network, CD/DVD, external HD etc.)
And yes - it uses single instance versions, so it takes up very little space, and it also has your versions recorded too - just like TM.
NB: I am *not* comparing an end-user tool such as TM to features from a high-end NOS, just FYI for those who may be interested.
If your dir happens to be shared from ZFS, then multiple versions, dated versions which don't overwrite each other, etc. are possible, even from a client with only e.g. NFS/Samba mounts, without much work. Not to mention the various RAID-like features for JBODs, iSCSI support, etc, etc. No worries with whether your storage device is local or remote.
Incidentally, I have yet to read the Ars Technica doc or ask my Mac friend: Is Mac OS X using ZFS yet? Because this looks very like a nice GUI to those features.
Regarding hard links, you are right, Unix has had them since time immemorial, but *not* usually for directories. The GNU coreutils info page says:
> On all existing implementations, you cannot
> make a hard link to a directory, and hard links
> cannot cross file system boundaries. (These
> restrictions are not mandated by POSIX, however.)
HP makes a similar point when talking about openVMS:
"OpenVMS supports hard links, or aliases, to directories as well as to files. Most UNIX systems limit hard links to normal files only."
And Wikipedia (God, I hate myself for quoting it) says:
"Most modern operating systems don't allow hard links on directories to prevent endless recursion."
As for HFS+, it doesn't have a "native" hard link structure internally but it does fake that feature for you, so the "ln" command on OS X works like you'd expect it to on any Unix. AFAIK it has always had this. So for TM, they just allowed hard links to directories, that's all.
Regarding the lack of support for networked backup via TM, Apple apparently pulled this at the last minute due to "reliability problems". Apparently the feature did exist in earlier developer releases. Most people seem to think this feature will be coming back one day, hopefully *after* the reliability issues are ironed out.
BTW, I know this is a very old thread but I did eventually get it working, by a combination of removing the apostrophe from my machine name, reformatting the disk with APM and leaving the machine untouched while it did its initial backup.
Register
I was planning to leave my appraisal of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's Time Machine feature until the end, but necessity has just forced me to look at it in depth straight away. Put simply, if it wasn't for Time Machine, you wouldn't be reading this article. Earlier today, I experienced one of about three kernel panics I've encountered …
Page:
I don't know anything about Macs or TM, but about "rsync/rsnapshot/find/dd" & stuff, yes.
So whenever I read someone saying "It took me about N minutes to cron up stuff to do stuff" I wanna hurl pizza bigtime. Anyone who "takes about 8 minutes" to do that sort of thing either:
1) has done sysadmin tasks over the past 3 years and can read follow his own how-to's painstakingly written down in his own wiki
or:
a) is a wild-blue-eyed believer in his powers to understand non-trivial command line invocations of potentially misbehaving software and
b) is talking out of his ass and
c) has not run any backup/restore tests
and thus needs to be driven away from complex machinery with a rubber hose.
Suggestion for evil graham
regarding your problems... "I found this because, guess what, it doesn't work for me with my G5 PowerMac and (brand new) Western Digital My Book combo. The backup just craps out with some unknown error and never gets to complete."
Make sure that the disk is partitioned using either the Apple Partition Map or GUID (required for intel) rather than the "Master Book Record" that I believe My Books are by default.
System profiler will show you the format quickly, and Disk Utility will let you (destructively) re-partition.
@Matt
>Gee, for just the price of buying an extra device you can make use of a backup feature. Lovely.
>Why not just have a RAID 1 system in the first place if you're going to run two drives?
------
I think you were so eager to bash Apple here that you completely missed the point of what a backup system even does. Backing up your files onto the same hard drive is kinda pointless, isn't it?
As for running RAID 1 - on a desktop, maybe. And the user can do that if they desire - OS X supports it. But what about the laptop user who is now forced to drag their external drive round with them? Sure RAID can work with only one of the drives present, but when you unhook the other, the RAID has to be rebuilt when it is reconnected. Since the rebuild process is basically synchronising the two drives... a backup of sorts.
Time Machine, on the other hand, stores incremental copies on the external drive and provides a very easy to use and intuitive interface to browse them with. This is in the true Apple fashion - sometimes they are not the first to offer that kind of software (let's face it, backup software has been around for a long while) - but they are often the first to make it usable by the average person. I'm not talking one of us - but the average person who wouldn't know how to do a backup otherwise, or use a computer. The kind of person who wouldn't understand a shell script to do the same thing that many others on here are claiming to be just as good.
Backup on the same with bootcamp's help
I used boot-camp to create a partition which I then reformatted and set up as a time machine partition. It won't protect me against hard drive failure but it does protect against accidental file deletions and application bugs. You need about 110% of the size of the data you expect to backup.
A step in the right direction, but the backup needs to improve.
They just need to add the ability to do a full disc/partition image to any system device while the OS is running.
On the PC I keep my personal data and OS on separate partitions, and backup my OS with True Image while windows is running.
I can restore using a boot CD and it always works.
I used retrospect to backup my documents. There you want to keep track of multiple file versions....
Both types of backup are needed.
Also RAID 1 is hardware redundancy not backup. I have my documents on a RAID 1 array, but that won't help if I screw up my financial spreadsheet and need to consult last weeks version.
Of course I use True Image and Retrospect which didn't come free with my OS.
Anyway step in the right direction for OSX they just need to get the bugs out and add some live drive imaging options to the mix.
rsync vs Time Machine.
rsync compares checksums on every file that may have been updated. i.e. it needs to open every single file that isn't obviously different, both on the source and the target disk.
Time Machine uses Leopard's FS Event facility to record changes to the file system (at the directory level), meaning that when the time comes to perform the backup, where is much less work to be done. As per the Ars Technica review: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14
Backup and restore methods...
What caused the problem in the reviewer's case was that the backed up copy was damaged too, because it was taken from an already damaged system. And the backup software didn't notice it, or suggested an older restore point.
What he did, was first trying the same thing as the last good configuration option for xp. It didn't work, tried it again, failed again. Then he tried the reinstall, except winxp doesn't need an external drive and can restore the system while keeping all the data in place. Most winxp users use the first feature without being aware of it because the system restore function does this exactly, and most of the time automatically after a crash or power failiure. Non professional winxp users mostly notice the longer load time, but that's all. Turning on the /SOS kernel switch makes windows boot like a linux box, with all the info scrolling on the screen. This way users can see the system restore in action.
The final solution was to reinstall and copy over the data, which is the 2nd option on the cd for system recovery and windows still does this in place. Windows also has the option to back up to any place, including a spare disk or partition inside the machine, an external drive or to a network storage. This backup function was present in older versions, afaik it was even included in the dos tools package. (win9x even had a gui version of it)
ps:
One of my friends usually turn off his system by stomping on the switch on the power strip. His system is doing an automated recovery almost on every boot and he didn't even notice it for years.
Lol - OS death after 2 weeks, 3 attempts to restore...
....Go cry, fanboys
What if someone steals your machine?
OK. These backups to an external drive are all fine and dandy if your system gets screwed, but what about if someone steals your machine? (and they would probably not be kind enough to leave the external drive behind).
I don't know why I'm bothering writing this as you'd have to be really sad/bored to get down through the 58 other lame comments about how you CAN force a backup, but hey.
Other likely cause is a fire in your house.
I'd like to be able to get my Mac to backup to the external drive connected to my XP machine, which is out in the garage. Anyone know how I can do that easily? Enough with the talking to myself already.
Steve
@Andrew Rennard
Actually, if you'd been paying attention you would have seen that the "find" script is designed to run every 5 minutes, not every hour. Personally, I find this to be the sort of time interval I need when working on most projects - designs, text, or programming. It can be (and is, in practice) tuned to ignore things like swapfiles and the various working files and directories that some programs create while open, but I cut that out for clarity.
And, as I also said, the example 1-line of code is in use on my Linux machines and several MACS (slightly modified to handle the different version of "cp" on the Mac) and has been for years. This is not a theoretical script. It works just dandy, partly because the time interval is so short that things tend to be in the system cache.
I suspect that you haven't thought through what Time Machine actually does in the background. It almost certainly isn't tagging every single file on the system for a notification otherwise bootup would take a very long time.
It's probably tagging one or two levels of directories and then, when they're listed as having changed, running a process on those directories to find the specific files. A process very like "find", in fact.
Title
I got half way though the comments and just lost the will to read any further.
The reviewer didnt give 10.5 95% he gave time Machine 95%!
This looks like a hardware issue not a software issue, I would say his hard drive is screwed.
Time Machine worked as advertised, was simple to use, had a nice (if some what cheesy) interface.
I felt the review was honest and forth comming, he didnt have to mention the two failures, I personally would have gone stright for the reformat option anyway.
10.5 has issues, wow what a surprise please excuse me while my little fantasy of perfect programmers at Apple disintergrates into dust, I will need to find a dark room to have a cry in for 5minutes.
I think 3 Kernal panics in 7 years is a good record, I wonder how many times in the last year my win2000 box has failed to boot (which i think is a hardware issue not software) and how many times it has hung or crashed? I think I would put that at something like 3 times a week.
Guess what, I will be getting a Mac in the new year. I wont be upgrading my win2000 machine to Vista, MS should give up on polishing its turd.
Just as an aside, I wonder what kind of spec machine you need to make shadow copy and aero work in a smooth usuable manner?
proud to be an anonymouse coward!
@Steve Button
"I'd like to be able to get my Mac to backup to the external drive connected to my XP machine, which is out in the garage. Anyone know how I can do that easily?"
Could you not mount the XP's drive as a Samba/Windows/WhateverItsCalledThisWeek share and set Time Machine (or whatever you use) to back up to that?
@Gerry - Thanks for the tip
I tried all those things - freshly partitioned with and without GUID, mounted the disk alternately via Firewire and USB2, disabled Bluetooth, renamed my machine without apostrophes or spaces.
So far, no joy.
So it looks like Time Machine is a nifty (but for me, unusable) technology. If I get it going I'll let you know.
re: re: Two Cheers
Chris, I did suspect that that might be the case, although the 'until the disk is full' bit is a little misleading. The machine in question isn't on all the time, or indeed doing much at the moment so I won't be able to test it much but we'll see how it goes.
Only 95%
Three hours to restore a flaky hard-drive on a consumer machine using the generalised, vendor default configuration is astonishing. I don't find the two false starts difficult to believe: if there is a dodgy super-block record or some other system level data error, the disc may be OK but the file system may be corrupt and a fresh install will be the fastest way to reliably recover.
This wasn't a restore of a single file on a working system, this was a restore of a complete working system on a corrupted hard drive.
For what it is worth: creating multiple links/names of directories by privileged processes is part of the original Unix specification and were necessary before the rename(2) system call was introduced They were used to rename directories and the reason mv(1) was suid root. Solaris still allows privileged processes to create links to directories and Mac OS has simply re-enabled the feature.
Of course linux/windows/bsd can do this
But it's not easy.
I've been doing it for years. rsync to an rsync server, then ln back in time, so that you have multiple revisions of your files without taking up more space. Or use CVS/SVN/WebDAV/whatever you want.
Sorted.
I am a professional sysadmin. Your mother probably isn't (and most of the Anonymous Cowards here don't seem to be either), though she (and you) can use Time Machine. The point isn't whether or not it's possible, it's how easy it is to use. If you don't need to use Time Machine then don't. You don't have to pay for it either, you can run Linux, be happy, and shut up. The Time Machine fans are fans because they can spend more time doing things they want to do instead of writing backup scripts.
And as for RAID 1, yeah, go ahead, run that. Then delete an important file by mistake (and don't say you never have) and cry. It's not a backup.
Time Machine - turn it off
I am fairly sure that the reviewer's problem was caused by time machine. I solved the same problem much more easily. I ran disk warrior (now that really is a one stop piece of software for mac owners) and deactivated Time Machine. Time machine seemed to have damaged the directory and altered the permissions (prior to running time machine, everything had been 100% ok according to both the disc utility and disk warrior).
My advice - deactivate time machine and use some other software (super duper, for example when shirt pocket have finalised their Leopard version or the software supplied by La Cie if you have one of their drives. Also, purchase Disk Warrior anyway.
P.S I actually like the cheesy presentation though.
Of course backup is nothing new..
But making it accessable to everyone is. If a backup is seamless and effortless, more people are likely to use it, and if its easy to restore, thats a bonus.
as for people saying "Oh wow, one mac failed, all must be bad"... Grow up. One mac failed = one mac failed. Still a better reliability rate than the 'Doze. Bringing the strength and security of Unix to the Everyman should me commended.
Volume Shadow Copy
Just sounds like Volume Shadow Copy, which has been in Windows for several years. Easy enough to set up something simlar manually with scheduled robocopy jobs as well.
Re:Of course linux/windows/bsd can do this
"But it's not easy."
Yes it is. Buy Linux Server Hacks and type in the code to get minimised daily backups going back as far as you want to spend storage on it;It's less than one page of a5. For the shorter term backups use the 1-liner cronjob above.
Is that hard?
If by "hard" you mean "on a par with moving the mouse" then, yes, a bit. But if you mean "on a par with editing a playlist in iTunes" then, no, its not really.
Just because your mother's never tried to learn something does not mean that she'd find it difficult. Don't assume users are morons until they confirm it - especially if they happen to be your mother!
The Xerox windows system that gave birth to the windows systems at Apple and Microsoft told a great fat lie: point and grunt makes everything easy and by extension if you can't do it with a mouse then it must be rocket science for the high priests to handle. This just isn't the case. If you conquered your fear of simple commands like "find" and "ln" you would discover that they are EASIER than the silly GUI versions, and what's more, they're already there on your Mac and you can make them do things without having to wait for Steve to bump them up his personal priority list.
Well, anyway, I'm sure you're never going to try thinking outside the little box with the fruit gums stuck on it, so forget I said anything: Time Machine is clearly a perfect solution for everyone who owns a computer and doesn't want to use it to its fullest capacity. Apple Mac - the world's most stylish room heaters.
Re: Re:Of course linux/windows/bsd can do this
Dear Anonymous,
So your mum, Mrs Coward, has a copy of "Linux Server Hacks" to hand does she?
Taking your arguments to their logical conclusion, we don't really need a GUI at all. Not just us techies, you mean nobody needs one. Sounds very much like 1983 to me.
Honestly, I am well acquainted with find and ln on a professional basis and I *could* use them to rustle up some homebrew backup, but guess what - I can't be arsed.
I know how my car engine works for that matter, but I have no intention of interacting with it using spanners. I just turn the key and go places - and if it breaks for some reason I take it to somewhere where they fix that stuff and give them some money. Life's too short.
I reckon loads of us are dying to hear about the slick user-friendly apps that you develop, on room heaters or indeed any other computer. Seriously.
Kernal Panics
I had two kernal panics on my MacBook Pro since I purchased it (6 mos ago). It's highly recommended that you have the hard drive completely replaced (Apple Store only informed of this after it happened the _second_ time). I started using an online backup service (Mozy) and then backing up my MacBook to the same external as my other home PC via a free utility from Lacie called SilverKeeper. That way everything from both computers is on the external HD and it's all backed up online to Mozy every night at 2am. My next idea is to use Time Machine and then back the Time Machine HD up to the external and hence to the web via Mozy as well - it's always a good idea to keep your backups elsewhere!
Leopard, Time Machine . . . in all honesty
I'm glad I queued up on the launch day for the sheer occassion of it all. That I wanted to pick up a multi-user version of Leopard was a by-product. Had it been cheaper on Amazon, perhaps I'd have merely been an onlooker that day but that's besides the point . . .
Am I happy with Leopard, is the question a lot of Mac users are asking. A lot will lie to themselves with their answer. I'm not UNhappy, but I'm not sure I wasn't happier with 10.4.10 - don't get me wrong, it's doing what I want it to do and Time Machine is lovely. But, like anything, there are niggles with it being a new operating system. Some are due to incompatible software (Skype 2.6.0.151 anyone???) whilst others are simply learning curves for the user - try doing a CTRL-Right Arrow within Excel to reach the end of the data range whilst Spaces is active!
The fact is, Leopard is going to be better when it reaches 10.5.2 and whether you upgrade now or later is simply down to one question . . . do you want to go through a little bit of an uncomfortable patch to be one step ahead of the game in three months time?
I've upgraded two of our three Macs . . . the MacBook Pro is staying on Tiger for now, thank you very much! Best of both worlds for me!
alright
Firstly: I love you all, thank you for replying. It's been a joyous read and my weekend starts with a light heart. Secondly TM is something my grandmother would use before I could explain the word "backup" to her. There. Okay, so this fine gentleman had problems with his complete installation. Well, poor him. Teaches him to install a dot-zero release. Pah!
Peace!
Steve, iLoveU!!1!
By eck, there's some id10ts about !
Why is it that only ONE person in all the above comments is capable of seeing what the initial problem is likely to have been ?
Yes, the restore failed first time around - could it perhaps be that the crash that made the machine unbootable had been caused by a damaged system file BEFORE the last backup ? As for the second attempt, well same problem, so same result. What do we conclude ? Well if you backup a damaged file, you'll end up with a copy of a damaged file !
Doing a fresh install and restore user data from backup would have put fresh copies of the system files on the machine and dealt with that problem.
Now, to all those "I could do that with a one-line rsync command" trolls - no you couldn't ! If you think you could then you need to find somewhere that sells clues, could you haven't got one ! Yes, you can use rsync to make ONE copy of the LATEST version, but a one liner to make a series of backups, all individually accessible, and all hard-linked together - pull the other one. That's the thing about TM, it makes MULTIPLE BACKUPS, each one of which is a complete backup in it's own right. Yes you CAN do it with rsync, but you'll need some scripting to manage the multiple versions etc - and it will be as slow as treacle as it searches the whole hard disk every time. Yes I DO know rsync, I use it extensively.
Does Windows shadow copy (or whatever) REALLY do that, or just keep n-versions of each file in a big heap ? And does it do it on separate disk so your files are still available when the disk dies ?
PS - Unix has had hard links for as long as I can remember, but HFS+ doesn't - that's why they've had to modify the file system to support TM.
PPS - And the reason for not supporting network storage ? Probably because very few network storage appliances will have the fidelity of file metadata to store the system files in a manner that the system could be faithfully restored from the backup. Given this, it's a lot easier to say "no network drives" that to say "only network drives supporting x, y, and z features" that will simply confuse most consumers.
Um, doesn't Vista do this...
Quote from the MS site:
"To help make protecting your files as convenient as possible, with Automatic Backup, you can back up your files to an external hard drive, secondary hard drive, writable CD or DVD, or to a network location. Best of all, Windows Vista will automatically make backups of your data on the schedule that you set, so you never have to worry about forgetting to back up your work.
Previously backed-up versions of files use only a bare minimum of disk space. If only a small part of a file changes (such as one slide in a presentation), only that portion gets tracked and saved.
Of course, backup is only as useful as the process you use to recover your work, and Windows Vista makes this a cinch. A recovery wizard helps you select the files or folders you want to restore and prompts you for the backup storage medium you used. Then it restores your files.
By the way, if you've accidentally written over a file, say saving an older version of a report you're writing over the top of a newer version, then the Shadow Copy feature can help you recover a prior version of that file."
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/backup.mspx
This is identical to Time Machine - the difference is purely that Vista is a touch more complicated to setup. It's wizard based and there's no techy options, and it obviously gives greater flexibility regarding location. (network, CD/DVD, external HD etc.)
And yes - it uses single instance versions, so it takes up very little space, and it also has your versions recorded too - just like TM.
@SImon Hobson (and others): Re: Macs & Filesystems
NB: I am *not* comparing an end-user tool such as TM to features from a high-end NOS, just FYI for those who may be interested.
If your dir happens to be shared from ZFS, then multiple versions, dated versions which don't overwrite each other, etc. are possible, even from a client with only e.g. NFS/Samba mounts, without much work. Not to mention the various RAID-like features for JBODs, iSCSI support, etc, etc. No worries with whether your storage device is local or remote.
Incidentally, I have yet to read the Ars Technica doc or ask my Mac friend: Is Mac OS X using ZFS yet? Because this looks very like a nice GUI to those features.
@Simon Hobson - hard links
Good points.
Regarding hard links, you are right, Unix has had them since time immemorial, but *not* usually for directories. The GNU coreutils info page says:
> On all existing implementations, you cannot
> make a hard link to a directory, and hard links
> cannot cross file system boundaries. (These
> restrictions are not mandated by POSIX, however.)
HP makes a similar point when talking about openVMS:
"OpenVMS supports hard links, or aliases, to directories as well as to files. Most UNIX systems limit hard links to normal files only."
And Wikipedia (God, I hate myself for quoting it) says:
"Most modern operating systems don't allow hard links on directories to prevent endless recursion."
As for HFS+, it doesn't have a "native" hard link structure internally but it does fake that feature for you, so the "ln" command on OS X works like you'd expect it to on any Unix. AFAIK it has always had this. So for TM, they just allowed hard links to directories, that's all.
Regarding the lack of support for networked backup via TM, Apple apparently pulled this at the last minute due to "reliability problems". Apparently the feature did exist in earlier developer releases. Most people seem to think this feature will be coming back one day, hopefully *after* the reliability issues are ironed out.
BTW, I know this is a very old thread but I did eventually get it working, by a combination of removing the apostrophe from my machine name, reformatting the disk with APM and leaving the machine untouched while it did its initial backup.
Page: