Prior to leopard I had a 500gb external drive, a 160Gb internal drive, and a 80gig pocket drive.
The pocket drive was used for films parallels VM's that I didn't have space for on my internal disk anymore. The 500gb was a clone of my internal HDD (250gb partition) and the rest (about 200 gig after formatting) was a backup of the pocket drive and overflow for other stuff. On the 500gb drive the 200gb partition was at the beginning of the drive, the 250gb partition was at the end. I did my initial time machine backup last night, 123gb left after that, not great for an incremental system, so I decided to move it all around today and I wanted it to be as future proof as possible. A good chance to test leopards live partitioning and see more of what goes on in time machine too.
My first realisation was that you can't extend a partition backwards. If there is no space after you partition, you aint extending it. This meant I couldn't grow my backup partition after shrinking my media partition.
My solution was to shrink my backup partition, create a second media partition, clone the first one onto the second, wipe the first, clone the backup onto the first, wipe the middle (original backup) and then extend the new backup into the space left by the original backup. Cloning should keep all file permissions, system files etc, as well as keep the original volume name.
So, I turned off time machine (so it wouldn't get confused, and started. Copying 120gb from one partition to another on a USB connection took hours, probably because I left spotlight on and indexing it all
, eventually all the cloning and deleting was finished, verifying the 120gb copy took about an hour again!
I turned time machine back on, in the preference panel the first backup, last backup and space used/free info was all correct. I thought I had won. I set the next backup off, and it copies about 600mb of new stuff. Fair enough, I had re-encoded a DVD while the copying was going on.
I opened finder, and was no files in my backup partition, before I saw a backup.backupdb folder/file. A bit worrying, but all files were present and correct in terminal.
I then launched time machine, and saw that all previous backups were missing, none were available, just the "system as it is now" time was visible.
I kicked off another manual backup, about 83mb. Quite high considering all I did was look at time machine. it took a while too. Launched again, still the same. Time to test it.
I deleted a contact from address book (something I had done previously to see how it worked before I started messing about) and tried to restore it in time machine. Nothing, it was not there, I couldn't step back in time. It was gone. So I undid the delete in address book and took another look at it all.
My first thought was permissions. My second thought was the db had gotten corrupted. In all honesty, I don't know what went wrong, it should have been fine. I considered trying to manually change the permissions on the backup files, but I had no confidence in the backup at this point. I do not want my initial backup of an incremental set to be corrupt!
I wiped it and will start again when I have a couple of hours tonight to run the first full backup.
I haven't looked at apple support pages yet, but I really hope they come up with a good way to migrate the backups, at some point I'm going to have a 500gig internal and want a terabyte backup, and I'll want to just copy my existing backup over and carry on, and right now I don't see that happening.
I'm still impressed with time machine, if you don't mess around with it like I did it looks great. But it needs to be more manageable than this. I'm also not sure I am totally happy with a backup being packed into a single file like that. It does make time machine users dependant on time machine to get files back, something that can't be said of superduper, or carbon copy cloner, where you can browse your backup from finder, terminal, windows machines Linux, whatever you want. I may invest in another 160gb drive to take monthly clones of my drive. In case of the worse and I end up having to recover my data with my Linux box.
The pocket drive was used for films parallels VM's that I didn't have space for on my internal disk anymore. The 500gb was a clone of my internal HDD (250gb partition) and the rest (about 200 gig after formatting) was a backup of the pocket drive and overflow for other stuff. On the 500gb drive the 200gb partition was at the beginning of the drive, the 250gb partition was at the end. I did my initial time machine backup last night, 123gb left after that, not great for an incremental system, so I decided to move it all around today and I wanted it to be as future proof as possible. A good chance to test leopards live partitioning and see more of what goes on in time machine too.
My first realisation was that you can't extend a partition backwards. If there is no space after you partition, you aint extending it. This meant I couldn't grow my backup partition after shrinking my media partition.
My solution was to shrink my backup partition, create a second media partition, clone the first one onto the second, wipe the first, clone the backup onto the first, wipe the middle (original backup) and then extend the new backup into the space left by the original backup. Cloning should keep all file permissions, system files etc, as well as keep the original volume name.
So, I turned off time machine (so it wouldn't get confused, and started. Copying 120gb from one partition to another on a USB connection took hours, probably because I left spotlight on and indexing it all
, eventually all the cloning and deleting was finished, verifying the 120gb copy took about an hour again! I turned time machine back on, in the preference panel the first backup, last backup and space used/free info was all correct. I thought I had won. I set the next backup off, and it copies about 600mb of new stuff. Fair enough, I had re-encoded a DVD while the copying was going on.
I opened finder, and was no files in my backup partition, before I saw a backup.backupdb folder/file. A bit worrying, but all files were present and correct in terminal.
I then launched time machine, and saw that all previous backups were missing, none were available, just the "system as it is now" time was visible.
I kicked off another manual backup, about 83mb. Quite high considering all I did was look at time machine. it took a while too. Launched again, still the same. Time to test it.
I deleted a contact from address book (something I had done previously to see how it worked before I started messing about) and tried to restore it in time machine. Nothing, it was not there, I couldn't step back in time. It was gone. So I undid the delete in address book and took another look at it all.
My first thought was permissions. My second thought was the db had gotten corrupted. In all honesty, I don't know what went wrong, it should have been fine. I considered trying to manually change the permissions on the backup files, but I had no confidence in the backup at this point. I do not want my initial backup of an incremental set to be corrupt!
I wiped it and will start again when I have a couple of hours tonight to run the first full backup.
I haven't looked at apple support pages yet, but I really hope they come up with a good way to migrate the backups, at some point I'm going to have a 500gig internal and want a terabyte backup, and I'll want to just copy my existing backup over and carry on, and right now I don't see that happening.
I'm still impressed with time machine, if you don't mess around with it like I did it looks great. But it needs to be more manageable than this. I'm also not sure I am totally happy with a backup being packed into a single file like that. It does make time machine users dependant on time machine to get files back, something that can't be said of superduper, or carbon copy cloner, where you can browse your backup from finder, terminal, windows machines Linux, whatever you want. I may invest in another 160gb drive to take monthly clones of my drive. In case of the worse and I end up having to recover my data with my Linux box.