I'm beginning to think Time Machine is garbage

It's performance has slowly gotten worse and worse. It hasn't completed a backup in over a month. It's now been trying to run a back up for about an hour and has complete 26k of 43.21Gb.

What the heck can I do with this?

are you using an external drive?

Yeah, it's a 500Gb Western Digital Book something or other.

crap i dont know then my aunt had that problem unitl she got a E/D

What format is the hard drive in? I believe you need HFS+ for it to work properly, so if you're on FAT32, that could possibly be why it's not working.

If it IS HFS+, then you might want to try formatting the drive and starting over.

Good point Kash. Time Machine appears to be working fine for me, although I have not needed to find a lost file yet.

Apple Knowledge Base article Mac OS X 10.5: Time Machine stops backing up to external disk could give you another troubleshooting trail to follow if suggestions above aren't applicable or don't work.

Mine has been bullet proof. And saved my hide a few times already.

powermacj7 said:

Good point Kash. Time Machine appears to be working fine for me, although I have not needed to find a lost file yet.

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You should try to recover a file! Just to test your backup plan. A sense of false security and all...

mine is extremely fast, and backs up without me even knowing it (except for hearing my external hard drive rev up) haha. i feel no lack of computer performance while it is revving up either.

Agree - to date (1 month) I am very happy with the way Time Machine performs. Back-ups are done seamlessly and virtually without me noticing. Very quick with Firewire!

Only thing that i would like to see is a choice from daily, weekly , or monthly. Instead of hourly.

mad_vtak said:

Only thing that i would like to see is a choice from daily, weekly , or monthly. Instead of hourly.

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You can change that. I have mine set to every 6 hours.

Like so in terminal:

$ sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 7200

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That will run it every 2 hours (7200 seconds).

giulio said:

Mine has been bullet proof. And saved my hide a few times already.

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Same here! No problems at all with mine. I've needed to use it a few times myself. I love it!

Only complaint is that I would like to have an "advanced" mode - I want to be able to plug the drive in, say "backup now" and unplug it when it's done and go... now, I have to wait until it's good and ready. I know they want it to be very simple to use, but would it really hurt them to add an "advanced settings" button so that the power users among us could have a little more control.

"I want to be able to plug the drive in, say "backup now" and unplug it when it's done and go..."

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you can. Plug it in, wait for the drive to mount in Finder, right click on the Time Machine Icon and choose Backup Now.

mad_vtak said:

Only thing that i would like to see is a choice from daily, weekly , or monthly. Instead of hourly.

Click to expand...

That would kind of defeat the purpose of Time Machine then. It would be just like any other backup program out there already. The point of Time Machine is to do all of the work for you so you never have to worry about backing up your stuff.

I know there are a lot of files that I would've already deleted by the time it got around to the next weekly update. Then those files would be lost forever if it didn't catch one of the backups times.



A question about system performance though. Wouldn't it slow your system down more, at least while backing up, if you were to set it not to back up as often? When it's done every couple hours it just pretty much does a quick scan to see if there has been any changes or additions. Right? Especially if you were doing it monthly it would be like when you first set up Time Machine and it took a good while to back everything up for the first time.

Maybe I just don't notice a performance decrease because I'm on a newer MBP. Maybe it's slower for users of older Mac's??? Anyways just my thoughts. I know they're probably not worth much HAHA.

karudzo said:

"I want to be able to plug the drive in, say "backup now" and unplug it when it's done and go..."

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you can. Plug it in, wait for the drive to mount in Finder, right click on the Time Machine Icon and choose Backup Now.

Click to expand...

Are you serious? Somehow I missed that, having convinced myself that it wasn't possible when I was digging around in System Preferences - I guess it pays to RTFM

Anyway, thank you!

It's gotten better, I think I was having some left over issues from the faulty MBP that I returned.

I will say that I have found when I am working and Time Machine is backing up it will regularly make all the programs I am running crap out and no longer respond, and stop responding itself. It's so bad that I don't plug in the external drive while I'm working, because to get it working again I have to power down the machine by holding down the power button, and leave it off for a few minutes.

Aside from that I have used it several times to back up files and can't imagine life without it now. I just plug it in when I'm done for the day now instead of while I work.

I just started using Time Machine two days ago, so I have no idea whether it actually works for me or not. I'm gonna give it a couple more weeks to decide whether to keep my external drive for Time Machine or just do manual backups.