My experience with TimeMachine so far...

Okay, so the WD 250GB drive I put into my MBP about 6 months ago started getting SMART errors in disk utility.

So... got an RMA through WD. Easy and painless... Didn't even have to talk to anyone! Got the advanced exchange too. So while waiting for the drive, I went out and picked up a 500gb USB (couldn't afford the $70 mark up on FW ones) to setup with TM. Initial backup took about 4 hours (150gb of data).

Of course, I manually backed up some data to a 2nd partition I made on the ext. drive. But surprisingly easy. I love the ability to browse through the different versions. It's like having SVN for your computer :-D

So I get the drive a bit ago and pop it in. Boot from the leopard image I hve on my firewire drive and go to restore from the TM image. First restore fails. Well, it says it completed... in all of about 30 seconds. So rebooted from the disc image and tried again. This time it worked. Took about 3 hours to restore.

After that, was able to boot into my old account and let it sit overnight to do all the caching for Spotlight. This... pretty much made the machine unusable during this period. Opening up a browser and trying to scroll would cause severe graphical corruption until I either apple-tabbed or pulled up the dashboard.

So the next day, everything seems to be okay, it's finished doing it's caching or whatever for Spotlight. I go ahead and run full diagnostics for the drive and other components, everythings good to go. Few things here and there get fixed with the file permissions.

But now... my problem...I connect my ext drive and try to do a backup to the same time machine partition. Instead of backing up at a decent speed.... it's going about .5kb/s. Yes.... .5kb/s. Anyone got any idea why?

I have over 300mb of new crap to sync with TM... and it will take... forever at those speeds.

So far TM is neat, but I don't think I will rely on it as my sole backup solution. Think I'm going to pick up the full version of SuperDuper! as well.

 

I watched the video.

TM looked smooth....

 

I used TM to local external HDD via USB but have changed to TM to a TC via 802.11n. My first backup was done via 802.11n but would probably have gone a lot faster had I plugged in my gigabit ethernet. Backups seem very slow. Sometimes it seems to take several minutes to push 10-20 meg of updates. I'm not ready to rely on TM as my only backup solution, but I'm not ready to rely on ANYTHING as my only backup solution.

Right now I have the backup that comes with dot mac and a half dozen other alternatives I'm taking a look at. I went over and browsed my Time Machine folder on my Time Capsule shared drive.

On my Time Capsule shared volume are three "sparsebundle" files. One for each of the mac's I have actively backing up to that time capsule. If you go from the shortcut on the desktop, you only see inside your own "sparsebundle" as if it was a disk image just for you.

I used "show package contents" on my backup and dove in. I could find individual files there. I feel a LOT better now, but still not ready to make TM/TC my ONLY solution. I felt a LOT better when I was able to dive into iphoto library and find individual files there as well. This means that while my iphoto library is 26 gig, the whole thing doesn't get backed up every time I touch its contents. Whew.

 

Yeah... Any idea why it would be slow?

I'm assuming it's throwing up because I'm trying to back up my system which was recovered from TM.

It sits at "Preparing Backup" for at least 30 min before it tries to actually upload anything. Browsing the TM seems fine. I've poked around on Google (not a lot... just a little) and people seem to largely have issues with just the initial TM creation.

 

Sorry, no idea about the slowness.

I know I keep my 500 gig Mybook usb drive from becoming plugged in because if I ever let it plug in, TM will quickly take off running with it since it appears that any usb drive that has ever been used for TM always and forever gets used for TM and there doesn't seem to be a way to shut it off other than renaming or deleting the backup set from the drive.

As it provides an extra safety net, I'm not willing to whack the time machine folders right now but the time is approaching when I'll nuke it and use it as a data drive more likely as a target for 3rd party backup software and a place for large media files I don't need with me on my Macbook all the time.

 

Yeah... it's been weird. I told TimeMachine to "Change disks" and basically just reselected the one I've been using. It went faster, and seems to be done, but for the past 20 min or so it has been telling me it's "Finishing backup".

From what I read on apples site, when you recover from TM, it is supposed to do a full backup again... mine didn't. I'm not too concerned about loosing the backups though... so I could reformat the drive.

FIY... if you turn off TM, you can plug in your disk and view it and it will not attempt to back it up.

This weekend, I think I'll reformat and reinstall Leopard from scratch. I can finally fix my Apache errors once and for all (upgrade from tiger to leopard breaks many things...). Then I'll import files from TM using the migration tool.

 

Why not just reinstall Leopard from the dvd and then manually transfer your files over? It appears as though something didn't copy correctly.

 

That would require me backing up all my system files manually as well.

But TM FINALLY finished. It's backed up once since it finished, and I can see all the past TM backups as well. So... it appears okay. But I will still have to reinstall Leopard this weekend then migrate the files over.

Not completely sure how I will be able to access files in TM that were under this account when I will have a new account.