Question about timemachine.

I got an external drive yesterday, and plugged it in, and it asked me if I wanted to use time machine... All fine and dandy...

Anyway, it now has a folder on it called Backups.backupdb, and inside that theres a folder 'My Name imac' and inside that folder is where its doing the backups. OK, all straight forward so far...

Well, Im happy with the state that the imac was in yesterday, and Id like to always keep that as a 'goto' point, if that makes sense. I know thats not the real point in Timemachine, but lets just say that I always want 'yesterday' to be available, as a specific set point in history.

(Edit for Clarification) When I say I always want yesterday available, I dont mean EVERY DAYS YESTERDAY. I mean yesterday being the 16th July 2010 (Just that specific day)

But I also want to continue using timemachine, but keep that folder separate, and to start using timemachine again, from today onwards, but to have it do a backup, and continue using in a diff folder.

The simple way would be to use another drive, but I dont have one available.

So, if I rename the folder 'Backups.backupdb' to 'old-Backups.backupdb' and then restrat time machine... Will timemachine simply generate a new folder, and start doing its buisness in the new folder? Leaving the 'old-Backups.backupdb' alone?

Hope that makes sense.

I'm not sure if that would work, but there is another option. If nothing has really changed between today and yesterday, you could download Carbon Copy Cloner, and do a bootable clone of your hard drive, and then that state would always be available should you need it.

I personally do not use CCC, but there are plenty of people here that do that would be able to give you more info,

Thanks. But I cant do the ccc, cause that would be a backup of today. (17th) Not yesterday. (16th)

Things have changed since yesterday. Thats why I wanna carry on doing the timemachine, but start from today, with yesterday saved for a rainy day.

I just tried creating a folder in documents and making a copy of the current July 16th folder, (its only 26 Gig) and could just be re-backed up with the new backup, but I got an error along the lines of "The volume has the wrong case sensitivity for a backup." Hmmmm

The basic answer to your question is "no."

I'm sure there are terminal wizards and file experts that could prove me wrong, but on a normal-user level, the answer is "no."

Your July 16th backup will continue to be available for weeks or months (depending on how large a drive you're using for TM), but Chef eam has the correct answer. A "clone" is the proper way to save a particular "state" for as long as you wish.

Time machine & CCC

chas_m said:

The basic answer to your question is "no."

I'm sure there are terminal wizards and file experts that could prove me wrong, but on a normal-user level, the answer is "no."

Your July 16th backup will continue to be available for weeks or months (depending on how large a drive you're using for TM), but Chef eam has the correct answer. A "clone" is the proper way to save a particular "state" for as long as you wish.

Click to expand...

This prompts me to ask some questions about Time Machine. I was using File Vault which meant that Time Machine only worked when I logged off after a session. I've disabled File Vault as I don't think it's necessary in a home environment unless the iMac is stolen?

I used to back up my documents onto encrypted folders on an external hard drive about once a week. This meant that, until a backup was deleted to make room for a new one I could recover old documents if I had overwritten them by mistake.

Is it possible to do this with Time Machine or does each backup overwrite all previous backups?

Also, if the Time Machine hard drive is stolen could the contents be read by anybody else?

I may be missing something here, but...

You have a TM backup of the state of the machine on the 16th, the state you wish to retain, yes?

Then why not just roll your machine back to that state using that TM backup, clone the state with CCC, then restore your machine to its current state, again using an immediately current TM backup?

Alwyn said:

Is it possible to do this with Time Machine or does each backup overwrite all previous backups?

Click to expand...

Have you not read anything about Time Machine yet?

Apple - Mac OS X - What is Mac OS X - Time Machine

As it says there, "Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month."

Also, if the Time Machine hard drive is stolen could the contents be read by anybody else?

Click to expand...

COULD they? Possibly yes (though they may need your admin password). Pretty unlikely though, don't you think?

Time Machine

I have now! I had read that, if you use File Vault, recovery is complicated. I only disabled FV yesterday and have now read up Time machine fro my Mac missing manual.

I had misunderstood a comment by TGITC about restoring everything to a previous date. Was he/she possibly looking for an equivalent to Windows System Restore?

Thanks for your help anyway.

I think that Time Machine does what you what by design. I recently restored my iMac and I do use Time Machine. I put the Mac OS X Snow Leopard install DVD in the iMac and rebooted. After the DVD came up (and I selected my language) from the DVD install utility menu, I choose restore from Time Machine (or words to that affect).

The Time Machine restore Utility found my Time Machine backup device (a Time Capsule), then I was presented with a list of dates to choose to use as the restore point. The dates were from the beginning of the Time Machine backup service life... that is, from when I first started using Time Machine.

Time Machine does not keep a daily backup forever. It starts tossing away some backups as time and space require. You should always have AROUND the date you want , give or take a week or so. If you truly want to save an exact date that is now in the Time Machine backup, you can save the entire backups.backup bundle to a device large enough to hold it.... likely another external drive. You could then always plug that drive in and use it as the restore Time Machine source, as I did, but knowing that the date you want is there for sure.

Another way to do this... if you want the state of the computer as you have it RIGHT NOW.
1) Go into Time Machine Preferences and unselect the external drive you are now using.
2) Turn off Time Machine.
3) Erase the backups.backupdb bundle on the external drive
4) Go back into Time Machine Preferences and select the external drive as the backup source.
5) Turn on Time Machine.
6) Wait as it does a full backup with TODAY as the starting point. From then on, if you need to get back to "I know this computer state is great", you pop in the install DVD and restore for Time Machine backup and select the first date to restore from.

BTW, restoring from a Time Machine backup does not take very long... as I remember, it only took about 35 minutes for me and I was right back were I wanted to be. Neat!

Mike

Thanks for all the replies.

I dont think its gonna be possible... But I will clarify WHY I wanted to do this.

I have had the mac for a month (1st Mac coming from windows) I had been 'playing' with it gently, before really starting to 'use it'...

It didnt really have much on it, but it was set up perfect. Just the little adjustments that you make at first, then forget about. My browser of choice is chrome, and I had all the bookmarks in place, passwords to sites stored, my tabs set to open with my everyday sites, all the plugins set up right etc...

I downloaded cyberduck, and programmed in my ftp for three locations. I have vlc set to open by default any file that isnt a .mov, I had my dock set up perfectly... My MAME was installed along with its roms and artwork and joystick settings...

You know, I had already done all of the little things, that are not a million miles away from the default settings out the box... But make life a million times easier on a daily basis...

On the 16th, I did a time machine backup, and decided to 'take the training wheels off' and plunge right in. I copied a lot of files over and installed a large application suite and a few program trials I want too test out and stuff...

Then on the 17th, it occurred to me. I wanted to continue using time machine from here on in... But I also wanted in the worst case senario, to be able to go back to the 16th.

In otherwords, should I in the future wanna go back a few days or weeks with time machine, I can, but should I wanna wipe the mac, and reinstall the OS and start from scratch... That I could still do so, but without having to start 100% from 'default'... Just from the point where I had all my essentials in place, but I hadnt really started installing other stuff, or filling it full of files... ie, the 16th....

Theoretically though, if the 1st ever backup I made, will remain as the oldest backup availible, until I run out of space, then I would still be fine.

The math of the drive space is as follows. I have a 1tb drive, but 300 is given to bootcamp, which doesnt backup anyway.

So my space available for snow leopard, is about 699GB. My backup drive is *500GB - But I doubt I'll fill up the more than 300GB of the main drive ever...

The first backup was 28gb in size, and todays was 40gb (With all the new info)

So, let me ask 2 new questions please:

1) if I run timemachine to its own schedule, ( I just leave it on ) Then how long will it take to fill my *500GB backup drive, to the point I loose the 15th as the oldest available point?

2) Or should I just run my timemachine manually, once each week? I know that limits its abilities, and I would theoretically loose a weeks work if it crashed, but that would keep the 15th available for a longer time into the future, yes?



* Yes, I KNOW I should have got a bigger drive. But the drives over 500gb required a separate power supply, meaning that not only would a plug socket be permanently tied to my backup drive, but it would have to be left powered up all the time. The 500GB drive, runs off a single USB from the imac...

While I cant say exactly how long it will take to fill the external drive with backups, I can cay it will take a while. I have had Time Machine doing backups on it's schedule since I took my iMac out of the box on Feb. 12, and have used 123 GB on my backup drive in 6 months. At this rate, it will take about 4 years to use up 500GB of that drive.

Chef_eam said:

While I cant say exactly how long it will take to fill the external drive with backups, I can cay it will take a while. I have had Time Machine doing backups on it's schedule since I took my iMac out of the box on Feb. 12, and have used 123 GB on my backup drive in 6 months. At this rate, it will take about 4 years to use up 500GB of that drive.

Click to expand...

Thankyou. Thats encouraging news Can I ask how much roughly you have used of your hardrive? How much info in Gigs are you backing up? OS + Programs + Files etc?

I have used around 80GB of the internal drive. And I have a lot of stuff installed on this thing (several 3D packages, most of the Adobe CS5 Suite, Office, iWork, etc), and a 50GB partition for Windows (not backed up). I am surprised I have not used more space than I have. I do have a second external drive that I keep the runtimes for my 3D software on as well as videos, so they are not being backed up to my Time Machine drive either. My renders are kept on the main drive in an Aperture library, usually in at least 2 different formats and several sizes (and different versions depending on post work).

The thing about Time Machine, if I understand it correctly, is that it includes a link to a file if it has not been modified instead of making another actual copy of it. This way, each successive backup is not replicating the entire previous ones, thus making them smaller and faster.

Chef_eam said:

I have used around 80GB of the internal drive. And I have a lot of stuff installed on this thing (several 3D packages, most of the Adobe CS5 Suite, Office, iWork, etc), and a 50GB partition for Windows (not backed up). I am surprised I have not used more space than I have. I do have a second external drive that I keep the runtimes for my 3D software on as well as videos, so they are not being backed up to my Time Machine drive either. My renders are kept on the main drive in an Aperture library, usually in at least 2 different formats and several sizes (and different versions depending on post work).

The thing about Time Machine, if I understand it correctly, is that it includes a link to a file if it has not been modified instead of making another actual copy of it. This way, each successive backup is not replicating the entire previous ones, thus making them smaller and faster.

Click to expand...

Thankyou very much. I think I am concerned over nothing