Backup-the-mac

On ts there was a discussion about TimeMachine or any other backup solution.

Just my two cents - Toad left and i could not argument enough.
TimeMachine surely is a nice idea.
It backups all hours and your computer gets "even slower". Not good when checking mail takes forever...

You have backups of all times in the past until you fill up the backupdatadrive. I can easily fill up 1 TB in one month with my macbook pro with 120 GB data on it. That's is one Terrabyte. If you need plenty of backups - thats okay. I just need one working backup.

The performance wireless (i am using a timecapsule) is ridculous. Initial backup took me 2 full days. And all hour it takes 7 minutes, as it backups all files that changed. a lot of logfiles, and the performance of sending it wirelessly is poor.

As my mindset is just my mindset i tend to understand what is going on. I dont understand the structure of a TimeMachine backup. Aliases allover-the-place. I read more than 5 articles to understand what exactly is going on - to no extent.

What i love about TimeMachine is the nice Interface for recovering "lost" files. Great Apple-like. But thats about it, and remines me of a nice add (but vice versa or vista) .

Please proove me wrong and tell me TimeMachine is a good solution.
Imagine it starts during hosting redline -> total knockoff.

I have been using Carbon Copy Cloner to copy several systems in the past.
Since version 3 it looks nice and lets you backup your system at intervalls you like (simple thing) AND lets you make incremental backups.

Just great. Of course you can use external Harddisks like Firewire or the Capsules...

I am in no way associated with Mike Bombich, but if you need a reliable backup in the private sector this is probably what you need...

Okay - was more than 2 cents...
sorry if i always write like a fool - normally i try to keep everything simple as can be.

alphonse

I run time machine and it has proved invaluable. I haven't noticed performance hits like what you describe, but I also am on a laptop and don't keep my external drive plugged in all the time. So maybe thats the option, keep it off and give yourself a regularly scheduled backup time.

Big thing to remember about time machine is that its not your archival backup method....if you have a movie on your desktop, backup via time machine, remove the movie...that movie is not in your time machine forever.....time machine will delete what it warrants as "unused items" from time to time.

There is a momentary hit on framerates when my time machine cuts in. But I wouldn't be without it.

Recently my iMac's HDD failed - slowly - over about a week. Eventually it stopped recognising its internal drive entirely - and it had to be lugged back to the apple Store for repairs. When I got it back I stuck in my install disk, chose Restore system from Backup - and within 2hrs my iMac was just as it was before it misbehaved.

I can't tell you the despair and misery of losing a HDD full of work, but its happened to me more than once. I learned my lesson, and TM is a thought-free solution. Until we get ZFS, I'd recommend it.

I have a 320Gb iMac, and my TM is on an external 750Mb drive.

I love Time Machine. It's saved my ass already (my freelance consulting company's books!).

I use SuperDuper! every night to clone both my boot volume and my all-important photography drive (and CCC before that). That means if I don't catch a lost file within a few hours, the loss is backed up and I'm hosed.

TimeMachine provides an incredible amount of security on top of that. The clones are only there to provide me with almost as much fault tolerance as RAID1, and the ability to roll back up to a bad update if I need to. When I get a Mac Pro in the winter, I'll probably RAID my photo volumes, but leave the boot volume as is.

I also use Mozy to backup ~97GB (280000+ files) of data (my photos and personal data) to the cloud - this runs every night as well.

I do not bother to backup my third-party music/movies/games.

TimeMachine does negatively impact games like Redline, so I usually turn it off when playing Redline. I believe the aforementioned Mac Pro will solve this problem (I have a dual 1.8GHz G5 (1st version - 5GB of RAM, 1.5 TB HDDs)).

Thanks for picking up today's discussion from our GT3 TS session. Sorry I had to leave so suddenly, my Momo FFB quit at the start, and I just could not handle another of Battle's rain races while trying to test the new Mustang against the 997.

Mysterious quits by the Momo are about as annoying as the issues I'm having with SuperDuper and my MBP's: most of the time SD will back up nightly over the wireless network but when it doesn't, I usually have to go back an create a new sparse image and start over again. I also make a manual monthly bootable backup with fire wire with no issues. The whole idea of the daily wireless backup is to not have to remember to backup anything. I just want it to happen automatically. Like you guys I like the idea of a boot clone.

The failed scheduling issues in SD are leading me to experiment with Time Machine now, and I have found that a complete restore in Time Machine is exactly the same process as recovering a sparse Image boot clone in SD. So if I can get Time Machine to see the backup drive every time I will probably make the switch. But the idea of hourly auto backups seems excessive and probably slow over my network, but if there aren't many changes, am hoping it won't be a problem.

Also, I came across a free app called "Time Machine Editor" on Version Tracker that allows for daily, weekly, or monthly scheduling of backups. I have not tried it yet, and the author says he does not know if it works with "AirDisks" on an Airport Extreme. I'll post my results here if you are interested.

I use Time Machine and it works fine for my needs. Recently, I've only been connecting my external HD (250 GB) every other day so Time Machine isn't backing up my entire computer every hours or so. I'm not doing much of anything important yet, so there is no need. My only gripe is TM did not want to complete the initial backup. It took at least a week of calling the Mac tech support, trying everything that came to mind, and that didn't even help. Finally it was found out that if you have ANYTHING on your desktop when you try and do a big backup, TM will stop backing up when it gets to that item(s). Don't know if any of you are having this problem but I thought I'd throw it out there. *toss*

EDIT: Just found out that I managed to delete one of my WIP cars. Thankfully I had backed up lately. Very easy to restore items with TM.

My internal drive is for system and apps only.
Data is on a 500 GB external drive, which I clone to another 500 GB drive once in a while (if important stuff has been done).
I use PsyncX to do that. Simple, powerful and free.

Even though I love its concept, Timemachine is off here because :
- I used PsynX with OSX 10.4, so my backup solution was already found before Time Machine was released
- I'm afraid it uses too much space.

I'm with Alphonse on this one. I was very excited about Time machine. I love it's elegance, ease of use, interface. I hate it's results.
Perhaps I just have things set up wrong, but as Alphonse, in no time was the back up disc filled. I have two 500g drives in tower. Just so many copies of everything with time machine. My previous method was carbon copy, and did a complete clone of my disk every 48 hours. That way, If I have a failure I can simply boot from drive and everything is as it should be. This of course, does not do what Time Machine does so well, go back in time and find that file you erased by accident.

SF

I had a nice revelation today.

I wrote a nasty bug into some code I was writing and wanted to jump back to a non-bugged version. Normally I'd be working within a versioning system, and I'd just revert back to the last commit - but this code has reached the satge where I'd sling it under version control. For a while I was stumped, because I couldn't remember the exact changes I'd made.

Then I remembered Time Machine, went back and restored the files from a day before - alongside the current files -and DiffMerged the restored code into the bugged code. Bingo.


I have the feeling this post may have been entirely too geeky.

See Flat wrote:Perhaps I just have things set up wrong, but as Alphonse, in no time was the back up disc filled. I have two 500g drives in tower. Just so many copies of everything with time machine.

So long as the Time Machine volume is larger than the set of stuff you're backing up, and you don't have a huge amount of churn, it does very well. It doesn't make a new backup of unchanged files, instead using hardlinks.

BackupPC uses this approach, and takes it further, using hardlinks for identical files between different PCs (Mac, Windows, Linux, *nix).

NoNameBrand wrote:So long as the Time Machine volume is larger than the set of stuff you're backing up, and you don't have a huge amount of churn, it does very well. It doesn't make a new backup of unchanged files, instead using hardlinks.

BackupPC uses this approach, and takes it further, using hardlinks for identical files between different PCs (Mac, Windows, Linux, *nix).

I have about 250gigs on my main 500gig drive. My back up drive is also 500gigs. It took about a month and there was no space left on it.

See Flat wrote:I have about 250gigs on my main 500gig drive. My back up drive is also 500gigs. It took about a month and there was no space left on it.

What's the point of having a backup drive if it's not full of backups? It should've then started deleting the oldest stuff at that point.

NoNameBrand wrote:What's the point of having a backup drive if it's not full of backups? It should've then started deleting the oldest stuff at that point.

Well, all fine and well with me if it would have done that but it didn't. It just gave me a time machine error that there was not enough space on the drive to complete the back and that I had to clear some space.

Ah, see, mine told me it was full and would start deleting stuff. *shrug*