So I decided a couple of months ago to go ahead and use time machine as a backup system. Well, every now and then I get a "time machine failed to backup" something or another error and I click OK and everything seems fine when the next backup happens. Well...I got a new message today. Apparently someone at Apple doesn't know the difference between a gigabyte and a megabyte. That's the "not confidence inspiring" portion of my thread title.
Here's the scenario:
Time machine pops up with a message that the backup is too large for the backup volume. it says that it needs 500-something MB to do the backup, but only 140 GB are available on the backup drive.
Well, first of all, the drive has 209 GB free, see the first attached screenshot. Second, 140GB should be plenty of space to store a 500MB backup, right? This is all happening on a separate internal hard drive in my 2008 mac pro. The only thing this drive has ever done is Time Machine. I bought it and installed it specifically for this.
The really frustrating thing is that I also got another message at this time saying that my oldest backup has been deleted to make room for a new backup. But there is more free space on my TM drive than there is content on my other hard drive to begin with...in other words there is room to do an entire backup outright with the free space on the TM drive, and yet Apple just went and deleted content without asking me. It just gave me a checkbox that I could click if I didn't want to be told that my oldest backups were deleted. The awful thing is that it says my oldest backup was August 21, 2008. So I open the TM browser and it says my oldest available backup is yesterday! I've had TM turned on for over a month now...this is awful.
I really don't think I trust this software at all.
Did I do something wrong? Am I crazy? I almost think I'd be better off with a RAID 1 array. Can you convert one drive to a RAID 1 array without wiping it first? Since it's just a duplicate copy of everything, it seems like that should be possible.
Not impressed with time machine.
Here's the scenario:
Time machine pops up with a message that the backup is too large for the backup volume. it says that it needs 500-something MB to do the backup, but only 140 GB are available on the backup drive.
Well, first of all, the drive has 209 GB free, see the first attached screenshot. Second, 140GB should be plenty of space to store a 500MB backup, right? This is all happening on a separate internal hard drive in my 2008 mac pro. The only thing this drive has ever done is Time Machine. I bought it and installed it specifically for this.
The really frustrating thing is that I also got another message at this time saying that my oldest backup has been deleted to make room for a new backup. But there is more free space on my TM drive than there is content on my other hard drive to begin with...in other words there is room to do an entire backup outright with the free space on the TM drive, and yet Apple just went and deleted content without asking me. It just gave me a checkbox that I could click if I didn't want to be told that my oldest backups were deleted. The awful thing is that it says my oldest backup was August 21, 2008. So I open the TM browser and it says my oldest available backup is yesterday! I've had TM turned on for over a month now...this is awful.
I really don't think I trust this software at all.
Did I do something wrong? Am I crazy? I almost think I'd be better off with a RAID 1 array. Can you convert one drive to a RAID 1 array without wiping it first? Since it's just a duplicate copy of everything, it seems like that should be possible.
Not impressed with time machine.
