How to use Time Machine with a laptop?

Time Machine will not backup over the Internet. If you don't want to carry a firewire drive with you then simply reconnect the backup drive when you are at home and as soon as TimeMachine notices that the backup drive is available it will automatically back up all files that have changed since the last time the backup drive was connected.

Time Machine was poorly thought out in that it requires a second harddrive. This is kind of silly if you ask me.

Case in point... if you have a laptop you're not likely to connect your computer to an external drive hourly (or even daily for that matter), so the idea of 'incremental backups' on a laptop is a joke. iMac's aren't much better. The only computer I would think TM is made for is a Mac Pro which can have many harddrives, BUT, chances are if you have a Mac Pro you're running X Server.

So I can safely say they didn't finish Time Machine, had they the need for a second harddrive wouldn't have been in place. Sounds like they spent more time on the UI than designing the solution. Especially since the backup harddrive isn't bootable.

Without a second hard-drive you don't really have a backup though... if your backups are stored on the same internal drive on your notebook as your original data is then if that drive fails you've lost all your data.

Touché, but I thought the point of Time Machine was for incremental backups (version control) rather than external full backups, such as what is available all ready in .Mac or other devices. I mean if you think about it the UI is completely geared toward the power of incremental backups.

I would have preferred Time Machine as it was originally announced, as it being an incremental backup tool that allows you to step back in time in your drive, regardless of whether or not you have 2 harddrives to use.

There's a command you can run in terminal, a few lines, that lets you backup to an airport extreme disk.

That is exactly what I wanted to hear. Backup to an Airport Disk. Tell me how, please! Also, can I have my MBP and my wife's MB both backup to the same Airport Disk with Time Machine?

You can share out an external drive on your desktop machine, then on the laptop it offers you this drive for Time Machine. Works better than AEBS as in my experience the disk sharing on AEBS is very unreliable - it keeps disconnecting drives.

Martin, is there something that needs to be done on the desktop computer so that TM on the laptop sees it? I have an external FW drive on my mac mini, i can connect to the mac mini from the macbook pro (file sharing, screen sharing) but TM still doesn't see any drive unless its directly connected to the MBP... Thanks,
Nic...

Hi Nic

On my systems, I just made sure it was correctly formatted (the drives have to be Mac OS Extended Journalled). Make sure you can see the drive on the desktop, then on the macbook pro, open Finder and select your desktop machine from the 'Shared' link on the left.

Open the drive and make sure you can view it OK.

Then go into TM and 'Change Disk' - it should be there with the host machine in grey after the disk name.

Hope this helps!

Hi Martin, turns out the drive I want to use isn't journalled, so I tried another one that is. I could open the drive and view it OK but TM still didn't see it. I right clicked the drive and clicked "Show Original", after doing this the drive appears in TM, yay! Thanks very much for your help..
Cheers,
Nic...

because you are a .mac subscriber, you can use the back to my mac feature to search back on your other mac at home and use time machine through that. i think. lol. well. that sounds right to me.

I have to disagree here, the whole point of a backup, is to use an external drive. And I use Time Machine with my laptop, with no problem. At night when I get home and plug my backup drive in, it autodetects it and starts backing up immediately.

The only problem I have with Time Machine is that its underlying daemon 'backupd' ***** up massive amounts of system resources (>75%) while running.

This is an EXCELLENT point. - Why not give users the ability to clone their drive or create a disk image from it every week or so, but in the meantime, just give us the UI for recovering trashed documents or reverting to changes made.

One simple way to do this would be to put a flash drive in every Mac that is separate from the HD. That would give you the safety of using something in addition to the drive and the convenience of mobility.

So - what if it's the middle of the afternoon, you're at a coffee shop and you want to use Time Machine to get that iPhoto event that you accidently deleted last week. You have to go home? That doesn't really work very well with our mobile lives, right?

Is there a way to use TM over the LAN?

Another question I have is how big should the drive be? TM does 1 backup every hour, 1 daily and 1 weekly. Are these all seperate files then it means i need a drive 3 times the size off my HD in my laptop.

any suggestions?