Leopard Coverage: More on Time Machine
We recently received several user questions regarding Time Machine, so we’re going to be replying to a lot of them. I’m sure a lot of you will be keen to know the answers too.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year and a half, you’ll have heard of Time Machine. It’s Apple’s interesting solution to the problem of backup. So, let’s head on to our first question.
Q: Do I need to format the external harddrive using a special format?
A: Yup, it needs to be formatted to HFS+. Time Machine may work on a drive with HFS+ and other partitions, but we haven’t tested this yet. In fact, you can have some files stored on your USB/Firewire HFS+ harddrive; Time Machine will happily coexist with them.
Q: Other files can exist!? How does that work?
A: When Time Machine first runs, it creates a folder called “FolderName.backupdb”. All your backup data is then stored within a folder that is named after your computer (i.e. “Marvin’s MacBook”). All backups are simply folders on the disk.
Q: Does this mean that one drive could be used with multiple Macs?
A: Absolutely! Each Mac (with unique computer names, of course) creates its own folder on the disk. They will then read/write to their respective backup databases.
Q: How often does it backup?
A: Hourly. A backup is made every hour, so long as the external hard drive is connected to the Mac. However, you will only be able to recover the hourly backups for the past 24 hours. After that, the data is consolidated into daily backups (we’re assuming for space reasons).
Q: If it’s backing up daily, won’t that require a lot of space?
A: Nope. Time Machine is smart enough to simply save the changes you made, not the entire file. In this way, Time Machine will require a lot more time to store your data initially. After that, it is simply storing the changes.
Q: What if I run out of space?
A: First of all, Time Machine won’t give you the option to use it, if your hard drive is too small. We’re assuming it requires a hard drive that’s on par or bigger than your internal system drive. If you run out of space, Time Machine will ask you before deleting older data.
There, we’ve answered your questions. If you want to know more about another new application, feel free to contact us. Leave a reply below, or use the contact form.
To refute the first point, I have a hard drive formated as FAT (because that’s what it came as, and I’m lazy), and Time Machine won’t use it without a reformat.
OK for one disk to be used for several Macs, but how about more than one disk for a single Mac. For example, I work at home and in an office: can I have one disk in each location?
I want to run TM on a network NAS drive. Is this possible. You imply it will, but Apple clearly says it must be a Firewire or USB drive and has expicitly taken away saving to an Airport extreme hard disk.
Thanks.
A: Nope. Time Machine is smart enough to simply save the changes you made, not the entire file.
Not entirely true. It saves backs up the files that have changed, not just the changes to the file.
can you use a networked drive, like an external plugged into an airport extreme?
I actually changed the options so that it would back up only non-system files. Less space.
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“can you use a networked drive, like an external plugged into an airport extreme?”
Not yet. Probably coming in an update.
From my own experience using Leopard…
Point 1 is plain wrong. You cannot use a non HFS+ file system. If your drive is FAT32 or otherwise Time Machine will say you can use the drive but put in brackets “Reformat required”. However, you can still use the drive for other files. Just don’t give them the time machine backup folder names. (Not that I’d see why you would.)
Second, Apple removed support for using Time Machine of remote devices like the airport extreme. The best you can get is to put the drive on a shared mac, share the drive using the standard AFP sharing (and it MUST be AFP, no SMB, no FTP), and then you’ll be able to use a remote machine. This kind of sucks because if the host machine goes to sleep you’re screwed for backups.
@David and Mike: Thanks for the heads up. Fixed!
@Graham: Not sure, but I highly doubt this would work because of the complexity.
Can you make Tim Machine take backup of an external drive (on to a second external disk)?
@Mikkel: Yep I have mine working fine on an external eSata hard drive.
How can you see that the files from your external drive are included in the backup. I have found a way to exclude files, folders or drives from the backup but I have not found a way to include an extra hard drive in what is being backed up.
Mikkel: to include a second drive in the backups, open System Preferences and click Time Machine. Then click Options, select the name of the drive you want to back up, and click ‘-’ (that’s a minus). That removes it from the “do not back up” list.
I should say that I have not tried this myself because my backup drive is too small to back up my other external drive, but I think it should work.
I have done exactly that, but I still doubt that it is included in the backup as the backup-file seems too small. Is anyone aware of some documentation that could clarify this issue?
Time Machine sucks. Simple as that. I have tried NUMEROUS times to get it to work and all it ever does is crash my entire system. It is not worth my time! I’m sick and tired of having to reboot my computer every time it tries to run a backup. I’ve done it all… to no avail. Apple… YOU HAVE DISAPPOINTED ME! You had 10 EXTRA MONTHS!!! What did you do with your time? Twiddle your thumbs?
Multiple users and sleep mode seem to confuse Time Machine. Also, I really only want it sitting as a network drive off of my Airport. I have a 1 TB Western Digital, so I want to share a partition with other computers.
This is frustrating. And the number of controls in the TM utiltity is very small. And then there is the problem of remounting drives that get ‘lost’ somehow.
And how do I get TM to take up with an existing drive image from an ‘earlier’ storage session?
I will be recording multi track audio with my mac. I do not want time machine to run back ups while I’m in a studio session. How do I handle this?
Why don’t y’all just use Acronis True Image? You can schedule full or incremental backups hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly–or a mix of same–and save to a partition, external device, or network resource of your choosing. Time Machine is a half-baked toy in comparison.
I work at home which is nothing new. I work at home* for money*, which is new to us, and my family is all working on adjusting. My“ office, until we decide if we are either moving or adding on, is half of my closet and has no door. If I had to guess what the most important boundary to set is while working from a home office, I' d guess a DOOR. My task load is getting more intense, which actually seems to be making it easier to fit within a M- F work week, though I appreciate the flex of being able to swap…
Actually Time Machine has some serious bugs – the biggest of which is that it doesn’t do the most basic thing its supposed to do.
I have about 32GB of data on my primary drive and a 250GB back up drive dedicated to Time Machine. In one day I got an error message telling me the drive was too full to run another back up. Time machine had deleted all my previous back ups from days and weeks before and had saved 8 exact copies of my 32GB of data this filling the disk. This is not how TM is supposed to work.
Lots of folks posting on Apple Discussion boards about this problem but no response from Apple (typical)
This problem still exists in Leopard 10.5.4, even with a clean install, I had copied 100mb of pdf’s to the documents folder and ATSSERVER and mdworker went nuts. Time machine also plays a big part in this problem, as every-time it updates, spotlight re indexes. with time machine running every hour, for 15 minutes, and then spotlight running for the next half hour, you get about 15 minutes of uninterrupted use of your machine out of every hour. Hard drive indexing has been tried with Windows based machines via shareware apps for the last 13 years, with the results allways being the same…. slow to no performance of the machine, because the machine is always trying to catch up with its self. Time machine may have been a good idea in theory, just too bad Apple didn’t spend some time testing it. Instead they were too busy coming up with Time capsule, to cheat users out of even more money.
To fix the problem with ATSSERVER & MDWORKER, you need to disable the useless Time Machine and disable Spotlight. Apple has some nice stuff, but it is expensive, and they suffer from the same problem as Microsoft…. they do not test anything. That is left to the people to do, and then when we find their problems they give out a patch… too bad we don’t also get a paycheck for our end user testing.
WTH, my daughter has been running Time Machine for about 6 months. Her hard drives crashes not to worry right. Wrong… 111 gig of 3 or 4 folders with 10 files in it. Why would it copy 10 or 20 files that didn’t change to fill 111 gig.
She learned the hard way copy the files you want to a CD/DVD.
Time machine is free, and is worth every penny.
Tried it once, and realized that restoring my machine from a hard drive failure would be a nightmare. Time Machine was built to restore a computer to an earlier state — but only if you have a running OS installation to restore it to! (Why did Apple copy Microsoft on this? I would have preferred a real backup solution).
If you want a real no-hassle backup, buy a copy of SuperDuper. It creates a *bootable* disk image that is an exact copy of your hard drive. It does incremental backup super fast. If your hard drive crashes, you just replace the broken one with the backup drive and you’re done.
Time Machine and their ilk just zip up your files… I don’t want to have to reinstall the OS just to recover from a hard drive crash.
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