I hate time machine

I hate time machine!

Today I received a new 320gb wd passport to back up my mac book pro. Before hand I had done some thinking about the best back up solution, rsync/tm/or other 3rd party software.

On plugging in this morning all was well and I decided to give TM a go, after seeing two people in the office 3 months ago have major problems with TIME machine...it all started well this morning completed the preparation in 30 minutes then started the initial backup of 135.5gb at 11:30 its now 16:32 and its backed up 31.40gb...TIME MACHINE has fully used all my time today and forced me to use another machine as it incapable of doing anything else but this initial backup...

now my dilemma...

do i wait for it to complete at this rate It wont be finished till tomorrow or do i stop time machine, format the new passport and set up rsync?

i have 10.5.6 installed...

anybody have any advice?

You should have just done the initial TM backup overnight. That is what I did (and setup for others). I have had great success with TM.

I've had TM randomly decide not to mount the parse.bundle more then a few times.. to the point where I consider it unstable and no longer use it.

Maybe it is time for a "who has had success with Time Machine" poll? I have it running on three Mac's and I have never had an issue. I have even restored twice from Time Machine. Once was a just a trial run. The other one was when I Time Machined my new MacBook Pro from my MacBook.

ok so I quit the initial backup about 17:00 tonight and deleted the backup file on the external drive. After which I tried it again. It seemed quicker but about 30.1gb it seemed to freeze. The second time round I had the activity monitor open at the same time and could see after a certain point around 30gb it was not doing anything...so I continued to watch for a further 25 minutes and then decided to abort the second attempt, deleted the backup file and erased the external drive using disk utility. I'm not sure why it is not working as smoothly maybe I should leave it over night!!

On the other hand I have started preparing an rsync script which I'll use with a cron job.

I'd like to see if this looks vaguely right before running it though


I'd like a complete backup of my laptop on the external drive hence the / which will backup to my volume backup on the drive.

supposedly -aE tells rsync to preserve permissions and to copy metadata.

-- delete anything that was deleted or moved will show up in your backup, i think i need this?

--progress never hurt i suppose

and to exclude my virtual machines.

I'll probably leave the tm running over night to see if gets further then if it doesnt i'll try the script tomorrow providing it looks ok.

Have you considered SuperDuper?

SuperDuper!

tm did not work overnight - it had frozen on 31gb and didnt look like it was doing anything so I stopped it. I'm having a look at superduper now, else I will try and use rsync which might be fun.

Maybe you should stop sitting there staring at it while it backs up. Plug in your drive. Tewll it to do the backup and comes back in a day or 2 and check.

I dont know why you said you can't do anything while it backs up. this is untrue. Backing up doesnt even register on my computer as taking up resources.

I am starting to wonder if there is something wrong with the drive. Have you ran diagnostics on it?

I dont know why you said you can't do anything while it backs up. this is untrue. Backing up doesnt even register on my computer as taking up resources.

Click to expand...

well i could'nt. Your right about the resources though, did'nt look as if it was taking up much but whenever I went do anything SPOD would occur, mac unusable. So I've completed a backup with rsync, looks ok accept every time I plug the passport in now something seems to be still being written to it as the free space is going down. I went to TM and specified that it doesnt use the drive but something is still being written to the ext drive.

i have to force unmount because the disk 'backup' is in use and could not be ejected.

i'm thinking about formatting the passport again and having another go at rsync but with more excludes because I literally have a copy of every file apart from the ones that it could'nt copy. I used this script in the end


the backup-error-log.txt eventually became very big and un-openable.

I've been googling around for the best solution to backup, incremental etc and what is important so that if I had a problem with this laptop I could restore with ease. I guess the most important thing on the laptop is a users home folder ~/ then after that I would say the applications possibly. I suppose it differs with every person.

ive been using TM. I like it and hate it. I like it's simplicity. I hate it backing up hourly. seems like overkill to me. backing up once or twice a day would be fine but their no settings to let me do that. it's filling up my external drive fast. all those copies of backups seems like wasted space to me. and it wont let me repair permissions on the drive.

I may go back to using Carbon copy cloner. not sure.

You've been around a long time and never heard of "Time Machine Scheduler" a free app? Download from here.

And you should be using both Time Machine and CCC to make backups. Time Machine backups are not bootable whereas CCC's are.

chscag said:

You've been around a long time and never heard of "Time Machine Scheduler" a free app? Download from here.

And you should be using both Time Machine and CCC to make backups. Time Machine backups are not bootable whereas CCC's are.

Click to expand...

I've been around a while and had never come across this. Time machine in its native form has never bothered me as I always have plenty of disk space available for its backups, but I will look at this and maybe make some adjustments.

Thanks for the link.

I've heard of it, didn't want to risk installing something new and untried.

macgig said:

I've heard of it, didn't want to risk installing something new and untried.

Click to expand...

Well, it's not new and certainly not untried. It was featured in MacWorld Magazine years ago when Time Machine first appeared in OS X 10.5.0 (Leopard).

Another option is turn off automatic backups in Time Machine. Of course this means you have to remember to do the backups yourself. That's the method I use. I make a Time Machine and CCC backup every two days or before any major update or new software installation. I like to control things myself and agree that Time Machine can be intrusive with its hourly backups.

As suggested use the registered ($30) version of SuperDuper and do a weekly update using the Smart Update procedure. That way you will have a bootable backup of your operating system and all files. One thing SD does not do is make a Recovery partition.

Best way around this for Lion and later operating systems is to maske a USB thumb drive prior to installing using LionDiscMaker.

I've run Time Machine for years without incident but I do recall that IF the program runs across an error (like a corrupted file for example) it will just stop.

I discovered TM Error Logger which makes it very easy to discover what the problem file is so that TM works properly again, and away I go. (TM Error Logger is just a fancy way of finding the TM log it automatically generates in the system).

There's also Time Machine Editor that, like Time Machine Scheduler, allows you to set how often TM does its thing and when. Bear in mind that in NORMAL use, TM has so little to change each hour that it is generally considered invisible by normal users. If you change TM to back up less frequently it will be MORE intrusive during those periods because now it has more to back up. You can, however, change to it back up at time when you are away from the computer or asleep etc so that can certainly be worked around.