Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's Time Machine

[ChrisA]

Can the Time Machine Backup disk (BUD), be a RAID instead of a single physical disk?

If I am going to set something like this TM, I may want to get a mini and connect a bunch of external drives and create a Raid 0 and Raid 1 set or maybe a raid 5 but do not think apple supports it.

A mini makes for a quite expensive RAID and I don't like the rat's nest of cables and wall worts. Better to buy a box that holds multiple internal drives. These boxes are cheaper than a Mini too. If you did it this way then yes TM could use it as a "BOD" because these boxes "look" just like one big drive. I think as soon as you have three disk drive RAID5 is the best option

 

[EagerDragon]

A mini makes for a quite expensive RAID and I don't like the rat's nest of cables and wall worts. Better to buy a box that holds multiple internal drives. These boxes are cheaper than a Mini too. If you did it this way then yes TM could use it as a "BOD" because these boxes "look" just like one big drive. I think as soon as you have three disk drive RAID5 is the best option

Well I was going to use the mini for other purposes also, but can you suggest a few Raid5 NAS that work well with Macs and can be formated like OSX likes?

 

[mrfrosty]

no they are not otherwise someone would have found it while dissasembling their computer. and why can people not understand that Time Machine has nothing to do with ZFS.

Time machine has EVERYTHING to do with ZFS. Maybe not now but as soon as RW zfs arrives for OSX the whole landscape changes. I have been using zfs for a while now on Solaris and i still think is some very strong voodoo magic.

 

[deboni]

Time Machine and ZFS

I have great hopes for Time Machine, but I have greater hopes for the combination of Time Machine and ZFS. What little I know about ZFS makes it seem like a natural base for implementing such automatic backup machinery. I'm really hoping it comes out very soon after (if not *with*) Leopard. That combination alone would cause me to buy a new system with drives to use as TM targets.

 

[manu chao]

I've never seen a RAID done of individual external drives attached through firewire/usb. That's a scary concept, I wouldn't touch. If you're really that interested in RAID, use a SAN, one of those drive cages, or setup your own server.

As several people have said, this works fine and I am actually using on as a secondary/tertiary backup for less important files.

Since I routinely upgrade the harddrives of my laptops, I now have a 20, a 60, a 100, a 120 and 160 GB external drive. The 20 and the 60 are now combined to a Raid (always buy enclosures with two connectors, so you can daisy chain several drives).

 

[manu chao]

This would be much more potentially possible if Leopard were running ZFS and you could save only the small bites and bits that had changed locally instead of re-writing whole files if only a small part of them had changed. These kind of small changes could potentially be catalogued locally and then moved to an external drive, assuming you have a certain amount of open space on the internal drive you were willing to sacrifice until your next "sync."

Anyone think that Apple is potentially considering shipping computers with a secondary, "hidden" drive (possibly flash-based) that could hold if not all of your back-ups, then at least the changes to files that have occurred between backup "sync"s? I could see them doing this as a way of making the backup issue transparent to the laptop user, especially after ZFS is implemented (even though it would seem to go against the basic "data pooling" nature of ZFS).

If you could use a USB stick for the temporarily (hourly) back-ups and a an external drive for the daily ones this would be cool.

 

[Avicdar]

Support apps like Aperture?

Most of my critical work is done with Aperture. It has its own vault system for backups, but does require you to implicitly perform the backup (its not difficult, but does take over the program and you can do nothing else while it does its thing).

Will time machine back up aperture files?

This is also complicated by the idea that aperture will allow you to create versions of images and you can make many changes to these as you go. There is no 'save' in Aperture, so I don't see how/when time machine will recognize that there is a new version of the original file, etc.

Any theories on whether Aperture will have time machine support?

My photography portfolio - www.avicdar.com

 

[Yuppi]

Wow, that solution is brilliant. It's underlying technologies are extremly clean, most possibly inspired by the backend of SVN which kind of works in the same way. The integration is beautiful, and the UI is genius.
THAT really blows me away. It doesn't look like a hack like the shadow-copy thing microsoft did. And the query stuff is extremly nice.

 

[manu chao]

Most of my critical work is done with Aperture. It has its own vault system for backups, but does require you to implicitly perform the backup (its not difficult, but does take over the program and you can do nothing else while it does its thing).

Will time machine back up aperture files?

This is also complicated by the idea that aperture will allow you to create versions of images and you can make many changes to these as you go. There is no 'save' in Aperture, so I don't see how/when time machine will recognize that there is a new version of the original file, etc.

Any theories on whether Aperture will have time machine support?

I am sure TM will work fine with Aperture. A version is just a collection of files. It is my believe that Aperture writes all changes made to versions immediately to disk. The thumbnails might be written with a small delay.

The tricky thing will be the user interface for restores but I hope that Aperture 2.0 will take care of that.

 

[Analog Kid]

Most of my critical work is done with Aperture. It has its own vault system for backups, but does require you to implicitly perform the backup (its not difficult, but does take over the program and you can do nothing else while it does its thing).

Will time machine back up aperture files?

This is also complicated by the idea that aperture will allow you to create versions of images and you can make many changes to these as you go. There is no 'save' in Aperture, so I don't see how/when time machine will recognize that there is a new version of the original file, etc.

Any theories on whether Aperture will have time machine support?

My photography portfolio - www.avicdar.com

Time Machine will be much appreciated by Aperture users... You know that warning Aperture gives you when you update a vault? The "Are you want to back up your data and keep it safe, because when you do that it's going to blow away the existing backup that's keeping your data safe" warning? Won't have to deal with that anymore... More backups, more better...

 

[Avicdar]

Time Machine will be much appreciated by Aperture users... You know that warning Aperture gives you when you update a vault? The "Are you want to back up your data and keep it safe, because when you do that it's going to blow away the existing backup that's keeping your data safe" warning? Won't have to deal with that anymore... More backups, more better...

Don't know what version of Aperture you're using, but I never get a message like that. I just get a message asking me if I really want to do it (presumably because its going to take a while).

Then a compare is done to the current library versus what is backed up to determine differences, and the differences alone are backed up. Aperture doesn't destroy the current backup to create a new one. It just adds to it.

 

[Analog Kid]

Don't know what version of Aperture you're using, but I never get a message like that. I just get a message asking me if I really want to do it (presumably because its going to take a while).

Then a compare is done to the current library versus what is backed up to determine differences, and the differences alone are backed up. Aperture doesn't destroy the current backup to create a new one. It just adds to it.

What I get is this:
"Are you sure you want to replace the contents of 'Aperture Vault' with the current contents of your library?

Updating this vault will back up all metadata, and all managed images added to your library.

This vault was last updated on Feb 10, 2007.

This cannot be undone."

That wasn't so much my point though-- I was being a bit "flip". My point was Time Machine will be a better solution than the current vaults.

 

[chrisgeleven]

I imagine Apple will release updates for all of its current apps to support Time Machine.

 

[72930]

Wow, that solution is brilliant. It's underlying technologies are extremly clean, most possibly inspired by the backend of SVN which kind of works in the same way. The integration is beautiful, and the UI is genius.
THAT really blows me away. It doesn't look like a hack like the shadow-copy thing microsoft did. And the query stuff is extremly nice.

It really is a great combination of great software and great looks...Apple seem to have done a fantastic job. Hopefully by the time we get Time Machine v.2 or v.3 in the next OS or 10.7, average broadband speeds will be good enough to backup using TM easily and quickly onto a server like .Mac...

 

[QuarterSwede]

I imagine the best way to handle that is get an Airport Extreme or similar router and plug your external HD directly into it.

Or just go cheaper and get a NAS drive and hook it up to your current network.

Regarding Time Machine, does anybody know if you have to let TM backup system files, programs, etc.? In other words, can I set TM to skip over my system files and have it just backup things like photos, videos, music, documents, etc?

Read the article. The answer is yes you can have it ignore whatever you want.

1) The TM archive continues to sound like it is not much like a bootable clone at all, and Apple hasn't revealed a way to make it act like one.

2) It was suggested in the FAQ (but not clearly documented, that I could see) that, if you had a failure, you could re-install Leopard on your replacement drive, and then image files back onto that install of Leopard, even though they're orphaned (they do not belong to a time state instance of the drive that you're using anymore). I guess I'll believe that this works reliably when I see it.

So there's no indication that TM has the capability to directly recover from a catastrophic failure in the way that you can boot directly from and use your clone made by CCC or SD, and/or reverse clone if you so desire onto your replacement drive.

I highly doubt you can boot from a TM backup since it's really just a database. Apparently what can be done is to pop in the Leopard Disc and choose to restore from a TM BUD. And if that's the case, who needs CCC or SD?

...this would mean it's probably not bootable but the Leopard install CD has an option to restore a disk from TM BUD (confirmed by c-Row).

 

[manu chao]

I highly doubt you can boot from a TM backup since it's really just a database. Apparently what can be done is to pop in the Leopard Disc and choose to restore from a TM BUD. And if that's the case, who needs CCC or SD?

A clone can get you working in a few minutes, a full restore can take five or more hours.
Moreover, running some diagnostics like DiskWarrior is also faster if you boot of a hard drive and not of a DVD. And a lot of diagnostic tools do not have a bootable DVD, ie, all the Unix command line tools.

 

[EagerDragon]

I am curious to see TM usage when working on a Laptop. I have a MacBook Pro which only attaches to an external storage once and a while. I work on the go, in different places like work, school or even a coffee shop. How protected are my files then? If I delete something while I am at school, is it gone? Do these backups only happen when I plug in my external hard drive at home? Or are these backups stored on my laptop until they can be dumped onto my external drive at home?

I know the question of .mac has been addressed, but what if I had an external storage device that I could access remotely, like my own server or the like.

It seems like this is an incredibly powerful tool for desktop users, but maybe not so much for us mobile-only users.

You need to connect to the external drive to bback it up. Filrs are not kept local on you laptop with the exception of the originals as normal.

 

[EagerDragon]

Does anyone know if Time Machine's external disk backup is blessed in a way that it can be used as an external boot drive?

You can boot from the DVD then using the dvd do a restoration of your entire disk drive including the OS and everything else. This is assuming you did back it up. At the end your machine will be bootable again down to the last backup. But no, the TM disk is not bootable.

 

[jwdsail]

Multiple TM drives (a drive for each location?)

I'm wondering if it would be possible to have 2 TM drives.... One in my office, and one in my home office for use w/ my MBP?

Anyone know if this will work?

jwd

 

[contoursvt]

I think what he's getting at which I agree with is that while the idea sounds cool, its not something 'totally new'. Its offering backups and data security which a user can have right now anyway if they plan things out. I think the option is great for people that dont do any kind of routine backups.

For example (I'm going to use windows for my examples because I primarily use that for my main system). These are things I've done to make sure I'm safe no matter what. In my opinion its not that difficult or intrusive.

-Made a System Image of the computer with nothing but the OS installed. I did this when I first built my machine. Burnt it to DVD - 2 copies.

-Make a secondary System Image after I installed all my main apps and hardware support for my devices and burnt it to DVD, again made 2 copies.

-Mounted my documents folder to my network server which stores the data on a mirrored 250GB set. Weekly full backups and incrementals done daily to a external USB 2.0 320GB drive. The backups run at 4am to ensure I never experience any slowdowns on my network when using the computer.

In addition to the above, whenever I'm working on an important document, I keep my own revisions. I mean how hard is it to have say a file called "resume" and when making a change, save as "resume-2".."resume-3"..etc? I could use the Vista previous version function to restore documents to a previous state but I've never needed it because its part of my process and its not any extra work.

Also the cost of what I've done is not high. My 'server' was a free computer given to me as it was obsolete. I added a $25 SATA controller, $13 USB 2.0 controller, $99 external HD, 2x $65 for the 250GB SATA drives. So the data redundancy and storage and all ended up being about $260 or so to implement. Power consumption is less than 100W so its not adding a huge drain. I dont even have a keyboard and mouse connected to the box. Just sits tucked out of the way and if I need, I can remote desktop into it.

So being old and miserable is the position you hold at Macrumors correct?

 

[mkrishnan]

I highly doubt you can boot from a TM backup since it's really just a database. Apparently what can be done is to pop in the Leopard Disc and choose to restore from a TM BUD. And if that's the case, who needs CCC or SD?

Okay, that's different from what I read. If you can restore using TM directly from the install DVD without having to first install OS X, that's fine with me.

 

[woodsie]

Time to buy a new external HDD

But the questions is, how big do we need?

 

[woodsie]

Time machine is great and it will stop all of the threads about I lost 3 days of work because I was too ******* dumb to save it.

people will still lose stuff if they forget to attached the back up drive.

 

[handotr]

Time Machine and HFS+ Question

I'm a newbie and have a question about HFS+ & Time Machine. I understand that I cannot use an HFS+ formatted drive on a windows machine but if I ever wanted to use Time Machine files on a windows machine, ie. word documents and music files, could I do it ? Maybe somehow transfer those files to another mac, reformat a new drive to fat 32 and copy the files over to a new drive. If I couldn't, I would have to reconsider even using time machine.