Time Machine

Av8 · 30 Oct 2007 at 13:33

Hello all,

Since upgrading to Leopard i've been looking into this 'Time Machine' and looking at using this through a networked (wireless) hard drive, i've done some research through Apple.com and have come to the conclusion that this is not supported.

Can anyone tell me otherwise, as i thought this would have been a good idea rather than just a physically connected hard drive. Windows supports this in Vista, thought this would have been supported in Leopard :eek:

Beepcake · 30 Oct 2007 at 13:36

It works fine over the network as long as the disk is mounted. It's obviously rather slow compared to backing up to a local firewire drive though

TheKnat · 30 Oct 2007 at 13:51

I found it was painfully slow going to a USB2 drive. It was backing up 18GB of data and it seemed to take an age

coyote · 30 Oct 2007 at 15:02

Beepcake said:
It works fine over the network as long as the disk is mounted. It's obviously rather slow compared to backing up to a local firewire drive though

It doesn't see any of my networked drives

What are you doing different?

SoapSurgeon · 30 Oct 2007 at 15:07

the problem im having is that my NAS no longer mounts like it did in tiger... my assumption was that if i could get it to mount under devices (like i used to be able to) then time machine would see it. However, now when i add server it gets lumped under shared tab.

Av8 · 30 Oct 2007 at 15:14

coyote said:
It doesn't see any of my networked drives

What are you doing different?

This is the same problem, under tiger i mounted the drive so to speak and had various files with in the network drive on the 'dock' and they were/are available now. Just that since upgrading to Leopard they are visible and useable but i still can't make 'Time Machine' see the drive for back up. :confused:

Phoen1x · 30 Oct 2007 at 16:16

slight hijack - but does the drive for Time machine need to be dedicated solely to this purpose? Or could I use it to store data on as well?

BillytheImpaler · 30 Oct 2007 at 16:22

TheKnat said:
I found it was painfully slow going to a USB2 drive. It was backing up 18GB of data and it seemed to take an age

The theoretical maximum of USB2 is 60 megabytes per second. If it ran at this speed it'd take 5.12 minutes to transfer 18 GiB. This assumes that your hard disk is capable of writing 60 MiB/s. Real-world speeds are usually much less than this. How long did it take for you?

Dru · 30 Oct 2007 at 16:34

Phoen1x said:
slight hijack - but does the drive for Time machine need to be dedicated solely to this purpose? Or could I use it to store data on as well?

All the time machine data just gets put in a folder on the HD so your free to use it for other things as well.

WotDa · 30 Oct 2007 at 16:36

Phoen1x said:
slight hijack - but does the drive for Time machine need to be dedicated solely to this purpose? O

Nope. Go ahead and stick your 300Gb pron collection on there too.

Beepcake · 30 Oct 2007 at 17:38

All I did was browse to the share, which mounted it (although it no longer shows in the old place.. it did in the previous betas if you enabled it but they removed the option

) and it just worked.

BillytheImpaler · 30 Oct 2007 at 18:46

So the way forward would be to throw together a quick Bash or Automator script to mount the network drive(s) and set it as a startup item, no?

whitecrook · 30 Oct 2007 at 21:23

It makes a full backup, from then on copies only updated files, and hard links to any unchanged files.

So the first time may take a while, but after it should be fairly quick.

TheKnat · 30 Oct 2007 at 22:17

whitecrook said:
It makes a full backup, from then on copies only updated files, and hard links to any unchanged files.

So the first time may take a while, but after it should be fairly quick.

Aha good to know. I was kinda worried that it would try and do 18GB backups every hour!

whitecrook · 30 Oct 2007 at 22:24

Fantastic Review (with nice links within) here: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars

and this talks about time machine:http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14

Phoen1x · 31 Oct 2007 at 07:00

Nope. Go ahead and stick your 300Gb pron collection on there too.

w00t!!!

retrac2k · 31 Oct 2007 at 10:05

When I tried to use my external HD with time machine, it prompted me to format the whole thing first! Is there any way around this? i.e. without having to back up my back ups first?!

Deleted member 651465 · 31 Oct 2007 at 11:37

whitecrook said:
It makes a full backup, from then on copies only updated files, and hard links to any unchanged files.

So the first time may take a while, but after it should be fairly quick.

It doesn't link. It copies the actual changed-file(s) to a subfolder on the backup drive.

whitecrook · 31 Oct 2007 at 18:10

EVH said:
It doesn't link. It copies the actual changed-file(s) to a subfolder on the backup drive.

Well obviously..

It links the UNCHANGED files. (to the previously backed up copy)

It knows which files have changed becasue of FSEvents. A technology arguably developed specially to facilitate the Time Machine.

Read the link I posted.

Oh and it's hard links, not Symlinks, so the the OS it appears there are multiple copies of the files, but there is always only one.

Fillado · 1 Nov 2007 at 19:38

retrac2k said:
When I tried to use my external HD with time machine, it prompted me to format the whole thing first! Is there any way around this? i.e. without having to back up my back ups first?!

That means your HDD isn't formatted HFS+...so no, you'll have to format it to HFS+ to be able to use Time Machine

Time Machine

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