That is true, but I'm backing up a clean install. So my TM backup is only a few gig larger than than the osx install disk.

Furthermore, my non-TM backups have been ~160 gig and taken up to 5 hours of constant writing to the hard drive, and those run and verify just fine on the disk.

Be sure to supply this sort of detail when you file your bug report to Apple. Without detailed bug reports, it will be much longer until Apple can diagnose and fix the problem.

Having read the threads in the links gthing provided,I cannot believe that it is pure coincidence that my external HD's demise happened whilst using TM.And,btw,I do know how to eject my external before turning it off.
I'm turning TM off and backing up the old fashioned way until Apple provide a fix.:mad:

It is corrupting disks
 

To all those " This is just coincidence" guys.

I have heard about several people being unable to mount their harddrives,
I had a email traffic with a couple of them and told them to to a manual fsck
everyone of these guys has a corrupted super block...

I work with harddrives for about 10 years now, as i do with unix.

Time Machine IS corrupting, at least, some hard drives.

I have seen TM corrupting the volume headers and super blocks on 3 brand new external hard drives and one internal harddrive

Extended read/write tests on this HD's don't show any errors

Reformating to HFS+, fire up TM and boom, corrupted hard disk

They had the same issues with TM over Airport, and now they turned it off
but... it happens to wired hard drives too.

Apple, fix this!

Links
 

See:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread....14221&tstart=0

and the other links posted before

I agree that it's not necessarily a coincidence that many are having problems with their external drives failing when Time Machine is initiated. I'm betting dollars to donuts that the vast majority of those having problems didn't verify and repair those drives prior to using them. With the amount that Time Machine works the directory structure, any previous problems will most likely show themselves.

I'm beginning to form the opinion that Apple should have delayed the release of Leopard a bit longer (or delayed the release of iPhone, which was the explanation for the late release of Leopard), because it is becoming evident that there are a greater-than-expected number of problems in a greater-than-expected number of places. I have no doubt that Apple will sort it all out, but so far Leopard has not proven to be the advance that Apple built it up to be.

Las_Vegas, I can't verify what ruebezahl reports, but if I read his post correctly, this has happened on new and newly formatted drives. Those really shouldn't require additional verification and repair unless the file structure isn't being created properly in the first place. If Time Machine had any propensity to cause failure in the directory structure, Apple should have either not included it yet, or have the program itself do a check on file system integrity before performing its tasks.

I haven't USED Leopard yet (I will have the opportunity next week), but from the posts I've been reading, it seems that it went out on time (more or less), but not in the state that we've come to expect from Apple, and that's unfortunate.

Joe VanZandt

Arrogance Never Helps
 

This is a problem that IS 100% related to Time Machine and Disk Utility and those who are trying to dissuade others here ought to do a little research before opening their yaps.

Time Machine (like many other aspects of Leopard) is broken from the start.

By default it includes the entire hard drive in it's backup scheme. I added everything to the exception list, except my own home folder. Which was 25GB. I had an external partitioned with 100GB figuring that was more than enough to incrementally back up 25GB for a while, particularly for test purposes.

Hell no.

Once TM was done with it's initial assesment, it informed be that I needed a drive at least 299GB in size in order to function. Which is the same thing it told me when I initially tried TM with my 250GB boot drive (pre-exception list use).

Why add exceptions when you're just going to ignore them?

This is just one of the many problems with Leopard that has forced me to conclude that Leopard is beta at best, and I'm disgusted with how Apple has foisted it upon unsuspecting consumers (just in time for Christmas) and will from here on out try to positive spin market the time away until they get bug fixes out.

haha! Good story :)

It sounds to me like Time Machine is a bit mixed up (as opposed to ignoring your exception list) - maybe this is due to some other problem with the drive or the filesystem? Did you check the filesystem with Disk Utility's "Repair Disk" or DiskWarrior ?

It appears that Time Machine does have a boolean 'SkipSystemFiles' in its preferences even though it's not in the preferences pane. It's off by default.

I think we are missing the point of time machine. It is meant for those who don't know how to back up their system, and would buy an external HD to do so. Yes, I agree, TM is lacking a lot of features. TM is also not a true snap shot back up system. Which is why it takes up so much space. TM makes hard links to your backed up data, and every time it backs up, it copies that data over. So, if you modify a 200MB file and then back up it up, there will be two copies of that 200MB file.

I haven't tinkered with it quite enough yet, but out of the box I already knew it was a consumer level product aimed at those who had no idea how back ups worked, so I knew that I probably would never use it for my own personal back ups. I still use rysnc over the network to a file server at home. Then anything crucial is backed up to another HD in case one of the drives should fail.

Time Machine is stable for me. But I have a weekly routine of rebooting from external HD and running Disk Warrior on all drives. My external startup system is still OS 10.4.10 until DW is updated.

In preparation for Leopard and TM I got a 500GB G-Drive and created two partitions with Disk Utility in 10.4.10, a 30GB partition for minimal startup system and the remaining 400+GB for TM.

TM use of drive space: Interestingly enough, my 435GB partition used for TM shows more than 337GB available, yet if I Get Info on the individual dated folders for my computer in TM's ".backupdb" folder most of them indicate a size of over 60GB, which would have filled the drive days ago, while Get Info on the partition itself indicates a total of only about 98GB used.

I attribute this to something I read elsewhere, perhaps MacNN, that TM uses "multi-links," a hybrid of hard links and soft links (aliases), to make more efficient use of storage space for its backups. While it may indeed be a "consumer-level" product, it sure makes backups easier for us end users.

I read somewhere (forget exactly where) that you can use Time Machine to restore your whole system, not just bits and pieces, if needed.

I'm sure you read it here! The easiest way to restore any complete Time Machine image is to boot the Leopard Install DVD and select Restore from the bottom of the Utilities menu. All Time Machine backups on the attached backup disk will be available by date.

Actually, if I recall correctly, reference is made to this capability in the video introduction to Leopard that Apple had on their website, though it was not a detailed "how to". It may well have been discussed on this forum (I definitely recall some thread mentioning that the Leopard install had the option of backing up your 10.4.x installation so it could be restored to Tiger if you needed to.)

Joe VanZandt

How is Time Machine supposed to know your home folder is not going to grow beyond 100 GiB? Considering iTunes Music folder and Movies folder are both found within a user's home folder by default, the home Users is typically the largest of the root level folders, using the bulk of available hard drive space.

While I can understand your frustration, since you have the knowledge and understanding necessary to keep your home folder's size down while testing TM, I believe Time Machine is behaving properly when considering that the average user does not share your knowledge.

Personally, I've been very happy with Leopard thus far. Sure, it has some issues, which should be expected of any x.0 release, but they are relatively few and minor. I certainly wouldn't consider it "beta at best". It certainly isn't a mature release at this point, but neither was 10.4.0.

Why should Time Machine be making ANY assumptions about how large the home folder -might- grow to be? The point is, the folder actually -was- only 25 GB. Just why did it calculate 299 GB as the minimum required space available? THAT seems to me to be Yellow's point--it calculated exactly the same space requirements when looking at the whole disk as it did when looking at a 25GB folder. By any accounts, that's a flaw.

Of course, you are right that every first-release is going to have some problems, but I frankly don't -recall- quite as many difficulties moving from Panther to Tiger. I suppose that one my my disappointments is that Leopard has been in the works for much longer than any of the other major released of OS X and that much had been promised. I think there -do- seem to be more problems, and I think the user-visible improvements are debatable, and I don't even -know- what all has been changed that isn't easily visible yet. Microsoft released an OS sort of like that (we call it Vista) and all we did was smirk at the Windows dupes. I'm afraid that Leopard isn't even as well-behaved as Vista (though Vista was a -lot- longer in being shipped, to be sure.) Both certainly -work- in the broadest sense, but neither has proven to be the breakthrough that the companies had tacitly promised, in my opinion.

Joe VanZandt

Time Machine [I]doesn't[I] make assumptions about how large the home folder might grow, including the assumption that it will remain at 25 GiB. Time Machine is a continual solution. It isn't logical to have less space available for TM backups than is available for the folder that is being backed up. Present size is irrelevant.

I agree that 299 GiB seems a bit arbitrary (although there is probably a very logical explanation for that size). But, it seems completely logical that it would pick a size larger than the drive being backed up, even if that drive is not yet full, or folders are selected to not be backed up. To allow any less space is just asking for problems. TM has to be prepared for any eventuality, and that includes the home folder growing to maximum size allowed by the hard drive.

I think Leopard is FAR better behaved than Vista. The overwhelming majority of software that worked in Tiger still works in Vista, with perhaps some minor bugs that are quickly being worked out by developers. The overwhelming majority of hardware is recognized by Leopard, without the need for new drivers. Leopard doesn't require the latest and greatest in hardware to run. My roommate just upgraded his nearly five year old iMac without issue. My other roommate has Vista home basic installed on a more powerful machine, with twice as much memory, and it is so slow (go fix breakfast while it boots up, because you have plenty of time to kill, slow) I don't understand how he can stand to use it. I have another friend who installed Vista Ultimate on his near new gaming laptop, only to see the OS use half his resources at idle. OTOH, applications open more quickly on my MacBook with Leopard than with Tiger, and my idle CPU use is even lower than before. I don't think Vista can be said to be better behaved than Leopard by any stretch of the imagination.

Leopard may not yet be a mature release, but it is a great x.0 release. We just aren't used to dealing with the minor bugs of initial releases, because we haven't had a new OS release in 2 1⁄2 years. We've been spoiled by Tiger's maturity.