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Time Machine FAQ

jehrler said:
Any chance Time Machine will allow spanning of its backups across multiple drives. It would be a nice way to use some of my current smaller drives.
Click to expand...

bankshot said:
Though I have no experience with Time Machine yet, I'm sure you could set this up fairly easily. The trick is to go into Disk Utility and put all your smaller drives together as a "Concatenated Disk Set". It's one of the options under the RAID tab in Tiger. This joins them together into one large logical "disk" that OS X then sees as a single unit. I'm sure Time Machine will then use that just as any other disk. It shouldn't care at all.
Click to expand...

I'll go with bankshot on this, you will with 99.99% probability back up to a RAID array, however, you will want to be careful. The setup outlined here (RAID 0 or striping) where you take multiple drives and create one larger drive increases your chances of your backup failing, since if one drive goes out you lose everything. There are other various RAID setups outlined here.

Various degrees of mirroring/striping are implemented and depending on your old drives you can setup arrays that can handle one or more drive failures without data loss, however you do sacrifice storage space for the redundancy. I currently run mirrored RAID drives on my home PC and work computer after some recent drive failures. Sure I'm wasting half my potential space but when it comes to that data I don't want to risk it over something as cheap as an extra HD.
 
Hoping I didn't miss this somewhere in here, but here goes. Anyone have any experience, or input, on how Time Machine is going to handle backing up multiple drives, say one internal, and 1-2 external drives, to a designated backup drive?

In a nutshell, I keep my OS on my internal drive. All video and photography work, Aperture Vaults, iMovie project etc., are kept on external firewire drives, that are now backed up to another Terabyte external drive. I guess what I'm asking is if Time machine will be able to backup my internal OS drive, as well as my external data drives. If I'm being clear on that, does anyone know the answer?

I guess the short question is how will Time machine handle backing up a machine that has multiple hard drives both internal and external.

Thanks for any reply on this as I'm trying to put the hardware together for a new system that will be ready by the time Leopard hits.
 
Some Facts About Time Machine

I don't know if anyone has shared this information yet but I thought I should put facts about time machine on the table...

1. TM backs-up to your external drive every hour

2. So if you create and delete a file or make multiple modifications during that period, they will not be backed up.

3. If your external hard-drive is not connected, time machine is useless. Although this is obvious, some people have been wondering about a TM buffer for portable computers which is unfortunately not a feature of TM.

4. So an external hard-drive does need to be connected all the time for backup, if it is not connected at the time of the backup, it will skip the backup.

5. As already mentioned, a drive does not need to be devoted to TM, it will simply create a folder called backup.

Based on this, those that believe TM is useless to all us portable Mac users (Macbook Pro owner myself) are sort of correct. But although we may not benefit from this ability to view previous versions of files at any time, it will still be a good backup utility, for nightly backups.

A suggestion I have for those with portable Macs, is to connect your portable hard drive to another computer in the house and share it over the network. That way your mac will backup wirelessly over the network. Or you could just backup to a storage area on your network. But this way at least when you are at home you will be able to use TM without wires.

Cheers,
Karl


Please note that although we are less than one month away from the release of Leopard, and even though these facts come after testing the latest build of Leopard, this information could be null and void by the final release.
 
Just installed Leopard... neat stuff!

So how do I mount my NAS as a drive so that it shows up as a selectable backup drive in Time Machine?
 
I've read through the thread and I'm still unclear about TM.

I have 2 mac laptops and 1 mini in the household. 120gb,160gb,80gb. I just got a deal on a external 500gb HD Drive.

Can you "manually" back it up without the going back 6 months worth of changes and just get a snapshot of the HD as the last time you used it?

Can you use 1 external drive for 3 computers like this?

How exactly does recovery work? If for example my macbook gets stolen, can I go buy a new one and have it replace all my data (no reloading apps either) at once?

Thanks guys, you're advice as always been excellent. I'd appreciate any insight because I need to have a good regular backup system and if TM works, I won't have to buy one extra.
 
guru_ck said:
Just installed Leopard... neat stuff!

So how do I mount my NAS as a drive so that it shows up as a selectable backup drive in Time Machine?
Click to expand...

Well it looks like Time Machine doesn't support my LinkStation NAS drive that is connected to my router... it doesn't show up as an available backup drive. I did however attach a Maxtor to the USB port on my Airport Extreme and it supports that... maybe because it's using AFP?
 
Mulitple Macs on 1 Airport Extreme?

I didn't see this while browsing, but can you use one AirDisk for multiple macs, or would one need to hook up multiple disks to the Airport Extreme, one for each Mac?

The idea of the Airport Extreme for this use makes it a very attractive reason to spend the extra $$ for it!

--Half Glass
 
kgraf6 said:
I don't know if anyone has shared this information yet but I thought I should put facts about time machine on the table...

1. TM backs-up to your external drive every hour

2. So if you create and delete a file or make multiple modifications during that period, they will not be backed up.

3. If your external hard-drive is not connected, time machine is useless. Although this is obvious, some people have been wondering about a TM buffer for portable computers which is unfortunately not a feature of TM.

4. So an external hard-drive does need to be connected all the time for backup, if it is not connected at the time of the backup, it will skip the backup.

5. As already mentioned, a drive does not need to be devoted to TM, it will simply create a folder called backup.

Based on this, those that believe TM is useless to all us portable Mac users (Macbook Pro owner myself) are sort of correct. But although we may not benefit from this ability to view previous versions of files at any time, it will still be a good backup utility, for nightly backups.

A suggestion I have for those with portable Macs, is to connect your portable hard drive to another computer in the house and share it over the network. That way your mac will backup wirelessly over the network. Or you could just backup to a storage area on your network. But this way at least when you are at home you will be able to use TM without wires.

Cheers,
Karl


Please note that although we are less than one month away from the release of Leopard, and even though these facts come after testing the latest build of Leopard, this information could be null and void by the final release.
Click to expand...

What about the pictures from appleinsider and apple's site where there is no drive attached to the computer, how is time machine working

timemachine_gallery_windows20070611.jpg
 
UrsaMajor said:
I've read through the thread and I'm still unclear about TM.

I have 2 mac laptops and 1 mini in the household. 120gb,160gb,80gb. I just got a deal on a external 500gb HD Drive.

Can you "manually" back it up without the going back 6 months worth of changes and just get a snapshot of the HD as the last time you used it?

Can you use 1 external drive for 3 computers like this?

How exactly does recovery work? If for example my macbook gets stolen, can I go buy a new one and have it replace all my data (no reloading apps either) at once?

Thanks guys, you're advice as always been excellent. I'd appreciate any insight because I need to have a good regular backup system and if TM works, I won't have to buy one extra.
Click to expand...

1. Not sure.

2.Yes

3.I'm pretty sure that in the install of leopard, the installer asks if you want to install from a time machine drive.
 
guru_ck said:
Well it looks like Time Machine doesn't support my LinkStation NAS drive that is connected to my router... it doesn't show up as an available backup drive. I did however attach a Maxtor to the USB port on my Airport Extreme and it supports that... maybe because it's using AFP?
Click to expand...

I have personally used SMB for it. I had not tried AFP yet (It should work). I think you should be able to get it to use NFS and maybe FTP.

SMB performance is really terrible. Snapshots aren't too bad, but the initial backup is really bad. (20GB took over 5 hours to complete)

I am going to be using my Linux server to providing AFP mounts to my 2 laptops and backup that way. From that point, I am going to enable quotas to control the space.

Anyway, can you mount that Linksys NAS device and see it in Finder ? Also, what filesystem do you have it mounted as ? If its anything except HFS+, its going to need to create images for it. That might interfere with it.
 
Half Glass said:
I didn't see this while browsing, but can you use one AirDisk for multiple macs, or would one need to hook up multiple disks to the Airport Extreme, one for each Mac?

The idea of the Airport Extreme for this use makes it a very attractive reason to spend the extra $$ for it!

--Half Glass
Click to expand...

It creates a directory called Backups.backupdb, then inside their it creates a directory for the name of your machine. Inside that, are dates of your snapspots ... then, inside that are the actual files. (Hard links for directories and files with no changes)

I haven't tried it, but I assume based on the directory structure it would work.

With that in mind, if you are doing this for multiple users you might want to enable the encryption features for privacy reasons.
 
/dev/toaster said:
I have personally used SMB for it. I had not tried AFP yet (It should work). I think you should be able to get it to use NFS and maybe FTP.

SMB performance is really terrible. Snapshots aren't too bad, but the initial backup is really bad. (20GB took over 5 hours to complete)

I am going to be using my Linux server to providing AFP mounts to my 2 laptops and backup that way. From that point, I am going to enable quotas to control the space.

Anyway, can you mount that Linksys NAS device and see it in Finder ? Also, what filesystem do you have it mounted as ? If its anything except HFS+, its going to need to create images for it. That might interfere with it.
Click to expand...

That makes sense actually... my independent NAS drive is formatted to it's own file system which I have no control over (fat32). I forgot that the external Maxtor drive that I hooked up to the Airport was formatted to Apple's own priority disk format. So it sounds like all I need to do is find an external NAS drive that supports HFS+? Any recommendations? What about that new Lacie drive that is coming out?

BTW I don't have the Airport Extreme Base station anymore so buying non NAS equipped drive is out of the question... it needs to have an ethernet jack.
 
xUKHCx said:
What about the pictures from appleinsider and apple's site where there is no drive attached to the computer, how is time machine working

timemachine_gallery_windows20070611.jpg
Click to expand...

I suspect they either:
1) Backed up to the internal HD because they didn't have an external partition readily available, or
2) Hid the external drive in the Finder.

In any case, you need your backup drive attached for Time Machine to work obviously. And those pictures off Apple's site are outdated.
 
Full Application Restore

Is it known if time machine backs up applications that you have installed and can restore them if you had to do something such as a clean install? I hate having to reinstall all my applications.
 
I dont see how you could, as the pointers, the snapshots in time are part of the install base. Once you reinstall, how will the data on the time machine drive match up if there are no more milestone points?
 
/dev/toaster said:
I have personally used SMB for it. I had not tried AFP yet (It should work). I think you should be able to get it to use NFS and maybe FTP.

SMB performance is really terrible. Snapshots aren't too bad, but the initial backup is really bad. (20GB took over 5 hours to complete)

I am going to be using my Linux server to providing AFP mounts to my 2 laptops and backup that way. From that point, I am going to enable quotas to control the space.

Anyway, can you mount that Linksys NAS device and see it in Finder ? Also, what filesystem do you have it mounted as ? If its anything except HFS+, its going to need to create images for it. That might interfere with it.
Click to expand...

I'm running a Linux machine with a couple of USB hard drives. They're all formatted under ext2 at the moment I think. If I setup AFS (I'm thinking the app name is netatalk or something of that sort), would I be able to hit one of the USB drives with TM on my Mac? If that's a yes might I also be able to pull this off through MacFUSE/SSHFS?

Currently I'm looking into setting up RsyncX with a series of scripts to run when I connect to my home network. Would take a load off my back to just wait for Leopard's release if TM is compatible with how storage is setup on my home network.

Thanks!
 
Does anyone know if Time Machine can back up my Mac HD along with other drives? I keep all my music and pictures on an external drive and also use an internal drive for file storage and want to know if time machine would back up all these together.
 
Rubin110 said:
I'm running a Linux machine with a couple of USB hard drives. They're all formatted under ext2 at the moment I think. If I setup AFS (I'm thinking the app name is netatalk or something of that sort), would I be able to hit one of the USB drives with TM on my Mac? If that's a yes might I also be able to pull this off through MacFUSE/SSHFS?

Currently I'm looking into setting up RsyncX with a series of scripts to run when I connect to my home network. Would take a load off my back to just wait for Leopard's release if TM is compatible with how storage is setup on my home network.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I haven't tried it with ext2 / ext3 ... so, no idea what would happen. I plan to try this next week at some point, if I am able to I will post the results.
 
Lougle said:
Does anyone know if Time Machine can back up my Mac HD along with other drives? I keep all my music and pictures on an external drive and also use an internal drive for file storage and want to know if time machine would back up all these together.
Click to expand...

I don't have an answer to this, but have the same question. (Actually, I asked it a while back and never got an answer).

At this point, I'm hoping\assuming it will, as I'm sure many, including myself, are in a similar situation.

So eh, does anyone know for sure? :)
 
rotlex said:
I don't have an answer to this, but have the same question. (Actually, I asked it a while back and never got an answer).

At this point, I'm hoping\assuming it will, as I'm sure many, including myself, are in a similar situation.

So eh, does anyone know for sure? :)
Click to expand...

As far as I know, I don't think you can do that. Sry if I'm wrong tho.
 
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