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atszyman said:
1) How does Time Machine work?

Time machine performs an automatic daily backup of your HD to an external drive or server. Every day at a set time (default of midnight) the OS will create a snapshot of your HD. The OS only updates things that have changed since yesterday so the amount of space taken up is minimized. If you accidentally delete or change a file you did not intend to you can go back to a snapshot of your drive for any given day.

3) What if I create and delete a file between backups? Is there a way to recover that file?

Unfortunately without any third party "undelete" utilities you are in the same boat as you would be if you did the same now. However if you delete a file that was there yesterday (even if you made extensive changes) you can always get yesterday's file back, which is usually better than having to re-create it from scratch.

Are these correct? I was assuming that Time Machine was using very similar tech to Spotlight and that it would be constantly making backups of files that you are changing. The nightly/daily backup would be of your full system but all day long Time Machine would be running in the background and "backing" up any files that you changed.

One of the closed threads came to this conclusion and then sent everyone over here. You read this and now you are back to square one....
 
sigamy said:
Are these correct? I was assuming that Time Machine was using very similar tech to Spotlight and that it would be constantly making backups of files that you are changing. The nightly/daily backup would be of your full system but all day long Time Machine would be running in the background and "backing" up any files that you changed.

One of the closed threads came to this conclusion and then sent everyone over here. You read this and now you are back to square one....

Nope they were not correct at the time I wrote this reply but newer information has come to light and things have been updated accordingly.
 
I pointed this out in the other thread, but Apple's documentation on Time Machine says that it backs up change as they occur...

Mac OS X Leopard Sneak Peak (emphasis added) said:
As you make changes, Time Machine only backs up what changes, all the while maintaining a comprehensive layout of your system.

Time machine would be able to recover a file you created and deleted in between the backups every 24 hours.

Also, from this...
http://www.macworld.com/2006/08/firstlooks/leotimemac/index.php

Macworld (emphasis added) said:
according to Apple, Leopard will automatically back up your files as you work.

I think numbers 1 and 3 are incorrect.

Thanks for the FAQ

applerocks
 
Thanks for the excellent FAQ. Unfortunately this probably means Time Machine will be a major disappointment to me, as compared to how I originally interpreted the announcement.

According to this FAQ and other sites I've seen, Time Machine only backs up to a separate partition or device. This makes it almost useless for laptops. Boo. :(

Also, it apparently only backs up once a day. Do a whole bunch of work on a critical file all day, accidentally delete it before tonight's backup, and all your work is still gone. Boo. :(

It seems that there's very little innovation here, simply a backup function built into the system instead of running as third party software. Initially I really thought Apple had hit a home run here, integrating ZFS or similar functionality at the filesystem level such that multiple revisions of files are instantaneously saved but not accessible except through the special interface. This would mean that every change to a file is truly saved (within limits of free disk space -- after that, old revisions would start to disappear), no nightly backup necessary, and it would work on laptops with only one drive. Enterprise-level products have had this stuff for years, and it's about time somebody brought it to the consumer. I'm so disappointed to find out that Apple did not do this.

At the very least, I would hope they added an on-the-fly daily list of changed files, so that at night during the backup, it only has to read that list. Searching through a large drive full of hundreds of thousands of files will still take a very long time (many minutes to possibly even hours) and cause a major performance hit while it runs, even if it's only copying the changed stuff. It still has to slog through thousands of directories just to see if anything changed or not. What they need to do is have this special list updated on the fly whenever a file is written, just as Spotlight updates its database on the fly. Then that night, the backup sees that only these 30 files changed, and it only backs up those files without even searching for others. Please tell me they did at least this much.
 
bankshot said:
Thanks for the excellent FAQ. Unfortunately this probably means Time Machine will be a major disappointment to me, as compared to how I originally interpreted the announcement....
Please tell me they did at least this much.

Well new information has come to light and the FAQ has been updated. As I've said before if you find other contrary information please let me know via PM, or posting here and if possible provide a link for the source.
 
wow, holy cow thanks for the 411. i'm looking forward to it however I really thing we need a way to secure delete an item.
 
projectle said:
You mean like Finder -> Secure Empty Trash?
How's that going to work in conjunction with Time Machine?

Will a Secure Empty Trash shred all of Time Machine backups of files in the Trash? Seems clunky.

I hope this is further signs of a new improved Finder.

B
 
bankshot said:
According to this FAQ and other sites I've seen, Time Machine only backs up to a separate partition or device. This makes it almost useless for laptops. Boo. :(

So what is the deal with a laptop user that backs up occasionally to an external HD? Isn't the version information stored on your primary HD so that it can be backed up later?

Sorry if this should have been clear already.
 
I dont know if anyone can confirm this, but to me it seem like all apple did was to write a very cool (i like it alot!) grafical user interface to SVN (or perhaps the olderversion CVS)?
This is a free Version tracking system that keeps track of all changes u make to a deposit of files (this time the complete hard drive).
This would make it possible to check out the latest version of your hard drive to any new drive u buy, or a clients drive and so on.
I use SVN daily and i use a Laptop, there is absolutly no conflict there, as someone earlier indicated. Perhaps it depends on how u use your laptop. Nomatter where or how i work, im always connected to the internet.
I would say, at the higher risk of being stolen, or being damadged, Timemachine is much more important to laptops than any stationary computer.
 
jackc said:
So what is the deal with a laptop user that backs up occasionally to an external HD? Isn't the version information stored on your primary HD so that it can be backed up later?

Sorry if this should have been clear already.

That is a complete unknown at this point. I have been unable to find any information that says how TM works when no backup drive is connected. See
#18.

According to what I've seen so far, the Finder is notified when files change and these changes are periodically written to the External drive. What happens when no external drive is connected has not been mentioned in any of my sources so far.

GodBless said:
Does anyone know if Time Machine makes bootable backups?

I've added it to the FAQ but I'm going to guess that due to the way TM keeps track of how your HD looked through history I'm guessing that the TM backup is some large database of files/folders. This would mean it's not bootable but I would guess that the Leopard install CD has an option to restore a disk from TM backup.
 
atszyman said:
Should work fine on any HW supported by Leopard. The visuals may be toned down if necessary but the functionality should remain.

So does that mean the visuals won't be hindered by macbook's integrated graphics?
 
Dale_Nx26 said:
So does that mean the visuals won't be hindered by macbook's integrated graphics?

That all depends on how graphic intensive the visuals are. TM will work on every Mac Leopard supports, however the nifty animations that they like to put in may not be available on every machine. I can't say one way or the other if the Mac Book's integrated graphics will be robust enough to handle all of TM's animations but you will not loose any of the backup functionality due to your video card.
 
any opinions on time machine and an internal RAID set-up? is RAID (set up for redundancy, not speed/size) necessary now? i would have though no, but i could be wrong.
 
dashiel said:
any opinions on time machine and an internal RAID set-up? is RAID (set up for redundancy, not speed/size) necessary now? i would have though no, but i could be wrong.

A mirrored raid array along with Time Machine would give you nearly 100% coverage considering you'd have to lose 3 HDs nearly simultaneously in order to lose anything.

TM, so far as we know, will somehow keep track of incremental changes throughout the day although it's unclear what happens when there is no backup drive connected. A mirrored RAID array would give you coverage for those times when the backup is not present but would not offer the same "go back" ability that TM would with the external drive.

One option if you did not want to do a mirrored RAID setup would be to have a second internal drive set up as your TM destination. Nearly as good as mirrored RAID (all information so far points to periodic writes to the BUD so you could potentially lose some data in the event of a failure) and you could keep the "go back" functionality.

*Wow, a sticky of my very own.... I feel special :D
 
I have a NAS set up in a raid5 configuration (n-1) and it would be just sweet if I could use a directory on that thing for each machine that's on the network. The nas is actually a linux server with a bunch of hard drives, but whatever works. It's more economically efficient to make a single, larger raid than a whole bunch of smaller ones methinks.

If what it says on the FAQ here is wrong, and you in fact can have multiple machines backed up to a single network drive in their own directories (rather than hijacking the drive), then I will rejoice! :D

If not, this will be almost useless to me. Partitioning your existing drive defeats the purpose, and I will not go out and get a bunch more hard drives for this, especially when I have a nas ready to go as it is.

c'mon apple! :cool:
 
gauchogolfer said:
^^ Thanks for the link, there are some cool screenshots there. How about this one:
picture1jx7.png


Is it currently possible to put different users in groups like this and apply permissions/access across all of them at once? Sounds cool.

Yes, this is currently possible but there isn't a convenient GUI to create the groups and group members. The groups and handling of the permissions has been standard in Unix filesystems since 1973.
 
Shananra said:
If what it says on the FAQ here is wrong, and you in fact can have multiple machines backed up to a single network drive in their own directories (rather than hijacking the drive), then I will rejoice! :D

If not, this will be almost useless to me. Partitioning your existing drive defeats the purpose, and I will not go out and get a bunch more hard drives for this, especially when I have a nas ready to go as it is.

There is another option. Instead of partitioning the drive you can create Disk images on the drive and mount/backup to the disk images. I currently do something similar with my PC since Carbon Copy Cloner doesn't seem to recognize networked drives as valid backup destinations. Creating a disk image solved that problem pretty nicely.
 
I really hope that TM has some kind of "private mode" like Safari (And not for banking, if you know what I mean ;) ).
 
mcmillan said:
I really hope that TM has some kind of "private mode" like Safari (And not for banking, if you know what I mean ;) ).
You mean Time Machine should have a pr0n mode like Safari?

They've probably at least made it so that Safari in private mode bypasses TM. ;)

B
 
balamw said:
You mean Time Machine should have a pr0n mode like Safari?

They've probably at least made it so that Safari in private mode bypasses TM. ;)

B

As quoted here:

To save space, Time Machine doesn’t bother with temporary files such as your browser cache.

Since you can also specify things you don't want TM to backup that should cover most of your concerns. Just download your private documents do a directory you have TM ignoring...:)
 
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