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Time Machine Puzzler

robotica

robotica

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jul 10, 2007
1,257
1,413
Edinburgh
Hello

I have just finished backing up my macbook air for the first time to a new formatted hard drive.

I have run it twice now

So on the macbook airs 80GB hard drive I have used 44.94GB

Once the backup is complete the size on the external backup drive is 34.48GB

This is confusing me - I was under the impression time machine does not compress your backups? If that's the case can anyone shed some light on whats going on here?

Many thanks :)
 
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leopard is around 10 gb
 
robotica said:
Hello

I have just finished backing up my macbook air for the first time to a new formatted hard drive.

I have run it twice now

So on the macbook airs 80GB hard drive I have used 44.94GB

Once the backup is complete the size on the external backup drive is 34.48GB

This is confusing me - I was under the impression time machine does not compress your backups? If that's the case can anyone shed some light on whats going on here?

Many thanks :)
Click to expand...
Your backup isn't compressed. Time Machine simply doesn't back up the Leopard system files, which take up about 10 GB once installed.
 
ok thats sounds reasonable .... so you use the leopard install disc to restore your installation, TM actually sources the OSX installation files from the original restore disc then rebuilds your system from the TM backup? efficient

Hopefully we will see TM with compression at some point in the future to shrink my backups even more :) It would seem that most modern macs would have no problem with compression. If you have ever imaged a windows or mac system with max compression it doesn't really take to much longer but can shrink a backup by half or more.

Thanks for the responses
 
Ok so I should prob start a new thread for this but how is everyone backing up bootcamp XP?

I tried using Acronis and Reflect but neither support GUID which results in being unable to backup XP as an Image which I could restore at a later date.

Is there a way to backup XP into an image?

All I really need is the ability to back up and restore XP without reinstalling from scratch :)

:)
 
robotica said:
Ok so I should prob start a new thread for this but how is everyone backing up bootcamp XP?

I tried using Acronis and Reflect but neither support GUID which results in being unable to backup XP as an Image which I could restore at a later date.

Is there a way to backup XP into an image?

All I really need is the ability to back up and restore XP without reinstalling from scratch :)

:)
Click to expand...
Yes - WinClone is the solution for this. It's a Mac program that creates images of Boot Camp partitions, which is exactly what you are looking for.
 
*update*

ok tried winclone twice now and i get this error message

hdiutil: create failed - Input/output error
return value of hdiutil create -puppetstrings -srcdevice "/dev/disk0s3" "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/MBA XP 13-10-08.winclone/Windows" 1>&2 is 256

hdiutil create -puppetstrings -srcdevice "/dev/disk0s3" "/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/MBA XP 13-10-08.winclone/Windows" 1>&2 did not complete successfully
cleaning up: Mounting Disk
Volume XP on /dev/disk0s3 mounted
Mon Oct 13 21:47:02 BST 2008

anyone with any idea? tnx
 
I suggest using a disk other than your Time Machine backup disk and other than your internal boot disk for the Winclone image. Make sure it is HFS+ formatted.
 
thanks wrldwzrd89,

I will check it out, was hoping to keep it as fat32 so i could read a write from 10.5 - hopefully will be fixed with an update :)
 
Try NTFS-3G and MacFUSE. They work beautifully, I've used that solution several times.

jW
 
Mal said:
Try NTFS-3G and MacFUSE. They work beautifully, I've used that solution several times.

jW
Click to expand...
I had problems with NTFS-3G and MacFUSE, namely that the Mac would always boot into Windows mode whenever it was restarted, and selecting the Windows partition in System Preferences -> Startup Disk was impossible. I uninstalled it, and all was well again... but another problem has come up which caused me to lose my Windows partition entirely. Oh well.
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
I suggest using a disk other than your Time Machine backup disk and other than your internal boot disk for the Winclone image. Make sure it is HFS+ formatted.
Click to expand...

wrldwzrd, is this comment based on past experience? I'm just about to try this on my MBP, hoping the Winclone image survives Time Machine.
 
calstars said:
wrldwzrd, is this comment based on past experience? I'm just about to try this on my MBP, hoping the Winclone image survives Time Machine.
Click to expand...
Yes, it was. I used an unofficial NTFS-3G build, if that makes any difference.

EDIT: Whoops, thought you quoted a different post of mine... anyway, the reason I say that is because Apple doesn't recommend that you put other files on your Time Machine drive.
 
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