User profile for user: Jeff Self
Jeff Self Author
User level: Level 1
100 points

My disappointment with Time Machine

I was really looking forward to Time Machine. But having set it up, I'm somewhat disappointed. Why? Because once again, Apple gets us so close to nirvana, then we hit the brick wall. The software is awesome. I love the interface. It really does make backup easy.

So what do I not like about it? Lets start with the lack of network storage. I was willing to let this go for now since I don't even have any network storage yet. I have an external 320GB FW800 drive. Perfect, right? Not so fast. Since I just installed Leopard, I haven't even copied all my data back to my desktop. I started up Time Machine on my external drive and immediately it said I didn't have enough room to backup. Thats not good. I haven't even copied video back to my system yet. Thats about 200GB's by itself. So now if I want to use Time Machine with the amount of data I have, I will need to probably get a 750GB external hard drive. Prices start around $300. Wonderful. I'd really rather spend that money on network storage than another external drive. I'm starting to think Amazon's S3 storage isn't so bad after all. 300GB of storage per month will run about $45 a month not including bandwith. And its offsite.

Ultimately, I'm waiting for some consumer network storage that uses ZFS instead of RAID.

17" MacBook Pro, PowerMac Dual 2.0 G5, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 8, 2007 6:30 AM

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9 replies
User profile for user: Tomás
Tomás
User level: Level 1
110 points

Nov 8, 2007 7:16 AM in response to Jeff Self

What bothers me about it is that when I tried to use it for the first time, it wanted to initialize my external drive. I have a 500 gb external drive where I keep my iTunes and iPhoto libraries, among other important data that I no longer keep on my PB hard drive which is only 80 gb. I have 200+ gb of free space on my external drive that I thought would be enough to put the Time Machine backups. Although I've owned home computers for 12 years and Macs for 7 out of those 12, I'm not very computer saavy, so maybe my frustration can be resolved by partitioning that external drive. Can it be done? How? Am I making sense??
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User profile for user: pvonk
pvonk
User level: Level 6
13,857 points

Nov 8, 2007 7:27 AM in response to Tomás

The TM backup drive has to be formatted as HFS+ journaled, since the data stored on the drive needs support for the new multi-links that Leopard has incorporated. Thus you need to have a Leopard machine format the disk that way. (That, at least, is my understanding of the situation - but I'd love to hear from others who have a better technical understanding of TM's needs.) Perhaps your disk is not formatted correctly, hence the message you got from TM that it needs to initialize the drive. Yes, making two partitions is a way to go, but then you'd have to copy your existing data elsewhere temporarily, since your plan would wipe out the disk.
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User profile for user: pvonk
pvonk
User level: Level 6
13,857 points

Nov 8, 2007 7:31 AM in response to Jeff Self

I suggest you do a bit of searching and reading in this forum, because I "archive and installed" my wife's PowerBook and was later able to TM her drive to a 250GB hard drive, and had tons of space left after the initial backup.

Have you properly formatted the drive? I know that's one issue, and there have been others mentioned in other threads that cause what you describe. If everything is done correctly, you should have no problems.
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User profile for user: a brody
a brody
User level: Level 10
85,314 points

Nov 8, 2007 7:58 AM in response to Jeff Self

Yes. If Spotlight hasn't searched a drive, other functions of the operating system may not speak to the drive as well. It is conceivable (I haven't proven it for myself yet), that Leopard needs to index the drive before it can put it in Time Machine's backup. I've seen cases where indexing was not complete, and nothing showed up on a hard drive's folder window back in Tiger.
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User profile for user: Guru Evi
Guru Evi
User level: Level 1
50 points

Nov 8, 2007 8:16 AM in response to Tomás

If it's a MS-DOS filesystem then it's not going to work with Time Machine. You need a HFS (partitioned or not) drive. I have an internal 250G drive that I back up my 80G drive to. Even then you can always use the extra space for other stuff like my video projects (Final Cut Pro).

As for the network backup: there are hacks to it already (look around) but the problem (I think) is that the network layer abstracts the 'raw' volume information so if Time Machine uses specific HFS functionality then the network layer will abstract that into NFS and SMB which those protocols don't understand those functions.

It's possible that you can repartition your drive without losing your data but you'll need special tools for that. I wouldn't risk it, invest in a decent firewire drive and use it as a Time Machine drive. Time Machine will detect automatically when it's connected and start a backup in the background. It's really smooth, you don't notice anything about it.
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My disappointment with Time Machine

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