Pitfalls to "Time Machine?"
 

I am considering using Time Machine in snow leopard to handle backing up my important work..doing it manually, I sorta get lost and there are too many files to compare to see which is newest...

Are there any pitfalls to using Time Machine for this pupose?

I have 2 aftermarket internal drives, same size, and was thinking one of these could be the drive to hold the backed-up stuff....from both my boot volume and my "work" volume.

Any thoughts, warnings, horror stories?

thanks!

a

I can't think of any major issues off the bat (I'm sure someone will chime in with some downers), but the fact is the sheer simplicity and routine use of TimeMachine far outweighs any minor issues it may have... IMHO.

Basically set it and forget it.... doesn't get much simpler than that.

Time Machine
 

I use TM wirelessly to a 24 inch iMac, and think it is great.
HOWEVER... TM links the files created in the backup to the specific ID of the machine being backed up. This makes sense of course. But, my USB system in the Mac failed. This required the replacement of the motherboard. A new motherboard means the ID of the Mac changed.
I could no longer read the back up files on the TM. I could no longer back up to the set up on the TM. I had to manually extract the files I wanted out of the bundles created in TM prefs, erase the TM, set up new TM prefs to my new Mac ID, and start over. :eek:
Another thing. The new ID is "System Serial#." So the serial number for Apple Care or whatever has to be read off the tag under the stand to which the Mac is mounted. :mad:

Hard drives are cheaper and larger than ever before. Backing up to them - whether via TM or other BU software is easier than ever. But any HD is capable of failing. Everything on it can be lost in an instant. This is the main reason I am shopping for an external BluRay burner. Even then, the largest BD disks only store 50 GB of data, and require a long time to burn. My iMac has a 500 GB drive. Hmmm. Lets do the math.. 10 dual layer BD = 500 GB.
This is how many hours for each full back up?

Maybe I should just cross my fingers and hope I never have a hard drive fail on me... again. Have you ever had an HD fail? Did you lose important photos or other items? TM is great. But it is part of a fallible system.

The TM program worked for us but two external drives (each attached to a different iMac) failed within 18 months of purchase...while the Macs were still working fine. We decided it was better to back up essential data to DropBox or to another Mac.

TM is very good at what it does. The important thing is not to mess with it.
Some people only plug in their backup drive once a day, let TM do a backup and then remove it. I would not recommend this. Just let the drive sit attached to the machine for as long as the computer is on. And don't alter the time interval between backups either.

The key to any backup is redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Your backup is a duplicate of your files, not the only copy. You can never have too many copies. Think: "what would I do if my computer broke/ was stolen/ caught fire".

Some people have thought that once the file is on TM, then you can delete it from your hard drive to save space.
It is true that TM can delete a file if it hasn't been on your computer long. If a file was only on your hard drive for over an hour, then when TM makes it weekly snapshot, this file may be lost. But anything that's been on there for over a month will be safe. (Until your drive is full and the earliest backups get deleted to make space.)
But then, anything that you want to keep should still be on your hard drive, so will also be in newer snapshots!

TM is very good at what it does. I've gone "back in time" a lot to rescue earlier versions of files that I'm working on, or retrieving accidentally deleted items.

TimeMachineEditor is a great tool for setting the frequency of backup.

And yes TM is a useful tool, but far from perfect IMHO !

Time Machine complains if it's not backed up in 10 days (vacation, …) and 20. Otherwise, if you buy a big Time Capsule for home, you get a way cooler network capability (sharing printer, etc. on the TC) and automated backups over AirPort.

When you're actually restoring, TM is slow to connect to the TC and display results (all jerky).

If you are using TC then always do first backup wired in to network.
Also if you need to restore use Ethernet too !
For daily incremental backups wireless is fine.

In this case you could have used this hint to continue using the same TM backup.

I'm quite conservative about backups -- On one machine, I leave TM running all the time to a partition on a new, healthy internal drive, AND do automated nightly SuperDuper! clones as well.

On my MBP, I leave an external TM drive attached and on all the time and do fairly regular SuperDuper! clones to yet another drive.

I much prefer TM direct to TM via LAN because in the direct case, the files are actually present and in the other they're stored as sparse images.

TM is great - especially if you just let it run at the 1 hour intervals. Mine's on a huge external drive through firewire. If you're doing a lot of writing it keeps incremental versions, saving a mammoth amount of time with document control. If I rethink my direction and want to go back to yesterday's version - there it is, or even forget all the rubbish I've written in the last couple of hours then I can just revert without any hassle. That's magic.

I've another drive that I clone onto as a shutdown task every Friday close of play, for that extra bit of security. That's saved me quite a few times..

Haven't had TM very long, but so far its been the easiest...set it and forget it. I leave it on all the time. I have had previous HD fail and since this can be the case with any product, i suppose it may well be safe to B/U to another HD every once in a while, but i just can't worry all the time about backing up and TM gives me a certain peace of mind I otherwise wouldn't have...I do like having the wireless printer option, however I did have some issues with setting this part up. I think it may have more to do with the drivers and printers that are not the big players out there.

Some files are not designed to be copied while active. FileMaker Pro database files, for example, will be slowly but steadily ruined if you back them up with any backup software while they are open.

@AHunter3; Are there others you know of?

The original will be ruined? Or the backup will be invalid? I can't see how the original file could become corrupt just because it was copied while active. Corruption on the backup side is easy to understand.

Exactly the same thing happened to us, except that both failures occurred within a year.

Our drives were from Western Digital. Both were replaced under warranty, although we had to pay the UPS shipping charges on the ones we returned. The new ones are working fine, so far. But I must say that it leaves me with a slight worry about reliability.

As for the TM program, it has worked perfectly as far as I can tell. It hasn't yet been tested by a disk failure.

Would using CCC be better than TM, or merely different?

I understand that TM is intended to be an automatic, "set it, forget it" thing.

a

CCC and SuperDuper! are both smart clone applications. Personally, I use both TM and SuperDuper! which can be scheduled and forgotten. My SD is set up to run at 3 AM and does so faithfully. I use TM primarily for recovering old copies after I've made changes I don't like, and for recovering from AppleScripting or Bash Scripting errors. The clone is for recovering from system foul ups or for restoring after an unsuccessful upgrade.

I guess the answer is: "merely different".

TM is set/forget. CCC is a more flexible, but more annoying (remember-it's-a-member) solution.

That's why I use SuperDuper!. Not free, but worth the price.

Both will be ruined. I'm not able to provide byte-level specifics of why the original is damaged by being copied while open, but it's definitely true and is acknowleged by FileMaker Inc themselves, which tells people to make sure to use only FileMaker Server to do backups, not to use backup software of any kind.

Can you quote where FileMaker says anything about the original being damaged?
On FileMaker's "tips" page (http://help.filemaker.com/app/answer...-file-recovery) it says: