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Oh how I don't love Time Machine

B

Baldrake

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 22, 2012
335
353
Great White North
The disk I was using for TM was getting flakey, so I got a new one. First time machine backup was 440 GB, and not surprisingly, it took days to run through. That's fine. Then time machine decided to do it all over again. Days later, it finally finished the second complete backup, and now 1 TB of my new 3 TB drive is taken up with effectively one backup.

It then sat for two days in "cleaning up..." phase. I let it run interrupted, hoping it would free up some of the extra space it was using. No such luck.

Now today, it has been sitting for hours on "Backing Up: 6 KB of 5.51 GB".

My brain says, ignore it and let it do it's thing. Maybe in a week or two it will have settled down. But...

Oh how I don't love Time Machine!!
 
SkyLinx said:
Days for 440 GB doesn't sound normal. Is this a Time Capsule / disk over the network or a "local" disk? Is TM doing encrypted backups?
Click to expand...
It's a NAS. My Wifi runs around 300 Mbps, so it's decently fast. And I'm not connected continuously, since I take my MBP to work during the day. I'm not so worried about the time for the initial backup, it's just everything that's come since that's a pain. :D
[doublepost=1523717352][/doublepost]
Fishrrman said:
If you "don't love" TM, may I make a suggestion?

Download and try CarbonCopyCloner:
Carbon Copy Cloner - Download
It's FREE to download and try for 30 days.

Once you try it, you'll NEVER want to go back to TM...
Click to expand...
Thanks, going to look at CCC.
 
After having my mbp for 3 years I finally decided to use Time Machine to back it up.

I'm using a 200 gig micro sd card with an adapter that sits flush to the side of the laptop. This way I can leave it in there all the time.

First back up took several hours and about $120 gigs. Subsequent snapshots only take a few minutes and range between 40mb and 200mb.

So far so good. My sd card is down to about 69 gigs. TM is automatically set to take one snapshot an hour...then saves one for every day for the past month...then saves one for every week for the past year. That adds up to a total of 106 snapshots. Hoping my disk has enough for all that.
 
Time Machine with my Time Capsule was actually very consistent, but very slow. I switched things over to Mac server based and things improved speed wise, but it has been totally unreliable over the last year. I have had to reset everything back to zero, in other words, wipe out the drives and start again, so many time in the last year that you cannot really call it a backup system anymore. Fortunately I have multiple backup systems, including Carbon Copy Cloner.
 
tresmith said:
After having my mbp for 3 years I finally decided to use Time Machine to back it up.

I'm using a 200 gig micro sd card with an adapter that sits flush to the side of the laptop. This way I can leave it in there all the time.

First back up took several hours and about $120 gigs. Subsequent snapshots only take a few minutes and range between 40mb and 200mb.

So far so good. My sd card is down to about 69 gigs. TM is automatically set to take one snapshot an hour...then saves one for every day for the past month...then saves one for every week for the past year. That adds up to a total of 106 snapshots. Hoping my disk has enough for all that.
Click to expand...
Alarm bells going off, to be honest. SD cards do not have good long-term reliability. See this thread for example.

Also, what if your whole laptop gets lost/stolen?

Nothing wrong with your approach, but I hope it's not your only backup strategy.
 
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I use a external hard drive for Time Machine, I have a Synology NAS, but since the backup must be done as an image (img file) the time it takes for opening, comparing and backing is to long, no matter the network speed. So I will recommend you to switch to a external drive. Used space is less too in the external drive.
 
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Baldrake said:
Alarm bells going off, to be honest. SD cards do not have good long-term reliability. See this thread for example.

Also, what if your whole laptop gets lost/stolen?

Nothing wrong with your approach, but I hope it's not your only backup strategy.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. I went with the SD just out of pure convenience.

I do have all my important paperwork backed up on dropbox. Photos and music are "backed up" so to speak on my iphone.

I would use a NAS but I have an airport express and it doesn't have such functionality.

But I will get an alternative soon.
[doublepost=1523985785][/doublepost]I just looked up the lifespan of a flash drive and they usually 10 years. I'll get a new every 5 years or so I should be good. Plus the fact that I'm not deleting and writing over stuff all the time means that it will last about the max time.
 
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