Backing up

Re: Backing up

Wasn't there a story not too long ago about a defect in some Seagate drives that were used in MacBooks causing data loss?

Here is something on it:
Seagate's MacBook Hard Drive Destroying Data -- Apple -- InformationWeek

-Keith

Re: Backing up

You'd think after the 2nd, a bell would go off on the oem drive and a better replacement would follow.

Among my local guys, there's a constant mistrust of ANY stock drive, even if it doesn't show signs of a bad run. Most of us have experienced 1 or 2 bad losses. That's the best learning experience.

Re: Backing up

Given how easy Apple has made doing backups with Time Machine people have almost no excuss not to backup now.

Re: Backing up

Whereas Time Machine is a great concept, it's sorely lacking in the implementation department. It's very intrusive and does not provide for turn-key recovery. Hourly backups are great if you're running mission critical applications, but to not let the user modify any settings whatsoever other than turning it on or off and choosing the target disc are short-sighted. It needs user adjustable parameters for frequency of backup, bootable disc mode, file/directory settings etc that are commonly available on other off-the-shelf backup products. I still use Carbon Copy and .mac Backup and can't see any benefit to Time Machine whatsoever.

Maybe future updates will make it a little more user-friendly.

Re: Backing up

I couldn't agree more with your comments regarding Time Machine. Why not include an advance tab or button with a warning when you change the various settings? That way the ease of use is left unchanged, but those of us who want more control or find the hourly backups intrusive can make changes.

Re: Backing up

Thinking like Apple and normal home user, I ask: Why?

I'm curious if you've even used TimeMachine?

The home user of an iMac or Mac Pro buys a 500 GB hard drive for $130, plugs it, turns on Time Machine and never thinks about it again. They've got ongoing backups, with one hour granularity. And now, as never before, you can recover from short-term mistakes easily. Made file changes that you wish you hadn't: you can recover that single file quickly. Time Machine is anything but intrusive -- you don't even know it's running unless you watch the Menu Bar icon spinning. And by all accounts, recovering an entire system from TimeMachine is fairly easy.

Certainly, I'd appreciate more flexibility. But as is, Time Machine is a great tool that most people would really benefit from.

Re: Backing up

Well, I have four Macs at home, so I guess that makes me a home user. And yes, to quell your curiosity, I have tried to use it. I find it extremely intrusive in general, not to mention absolutely useless with a portable machine (ever close a MB/MBP during an unwarranted hard-scheduled hourly backup?). As to short-term mistakes, my 10-year old on an iMac has yet to require one hour granularity. Maybe that's something one acquires with age.

BTW, regarding '...recovering an entire system from TimeMachine is fairly easy', this is not the case compared to a clone.

It was one of the features that I was very excited about when it was announced, and I upgraded the day it was released. It may be of value to a certain type of user, but I find it very poorly executed.

Re: Backing up

I don't have a Seagate drive (my 2.33 C2D MBP came with a Fujitsu 120GB 5400RPM, and I've since swapped it out with a Hitachi 200GB 7200RPM drive) and I still back up regularly.

I agree that Time Machine is a good, but flawed concept, in that it doesn't make a bootable backup.

I personally use the newest version of Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1. It has done a fantastic job, and it defragments while copying. I usually clone once a week. Takes about an hour for 100GB of data via Firewire 400 to an external drive. Every month or so (depending on how much my system has fragmented) I clone and then boot from the clone and clone back to my internal HD. Have had nothing but great success in doing that.

Re: Backing up

Interesting discussion. I must admit that since getting Leopard I've gotten "lazy" and just let Time Machine take care of the backups.

Although my iMac has a 750Gb drive, I'm not using anywhere near that amount so my external 320Gb USB2 drive is fine.

Should I also use SuperDuper (which I used to use on Tiger) to do system backups every week or so?

If so, should I invest in a second external drive - ie have one drive for TimeMachine and another for SuperDuper? The Time Machine drive has a single folder called Backups.backupdb on it, and is running at about 80Gb full at the moment.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Backing up

How is it intrusive? Can you elaborate on this? We have it on a G5 desktop system and on a recent MBP, and without exaggeration, neither my wife nor I notice it running on either machine.

As for how easy it is: certainly it's simpler to revert to a clone of the harddrive. But how easy is it to recover five corrupted photos in iPhoto's library from a full system clone? In Time Machine it took me about 10 minutes to dial back to before my photos were mangled and restore them.

As for not being bootable, this is where I note that home users aren't runing Mission Critical apps, so who cares? So it takes a few hours instead of a few minutes to recover in the case of a catastrophic drive failure...I'm just thankful to have a backup.

TimeMachine is not the end all of backup. My wife also uses .Mac to backup key files online. And I plan to buy and run SuperDuper! to complement TimeMachine. (Darren -- I think SuperDuper! is a good idea to use with TM. They both ultimately do different things that go great together.)

I hope Apple improves the interface (I'd like to recover directly from the Finder. I'd like to see more powerful integration with individual applications.). And more settings would be useful for the more sophisticated users.

But again, for most users -- who never have and never will otherwise set up a backup program -- TimeMachine is a no brainer. Plug in an external hard-drive and they're done. I'd urge anyone who doesn't yet have a regular backup system -- and backing up some files to CD when it crosses your mind every 9 months doesn't count -- to buy an external hard drive and start Time Machine today.

Re: Backing up

For you guys complaining about the lack of control you
have with Time Machine you may be interested in this
free app that only scratches the surface in improving
scheduling...

TimeMachineScheduler - set the backup interval of Time Machine

Re: Backing up

Personally, SuperDuper does the trick for me. I have one HD in a Firewire housing, segmented into three partitions which I use to back my boot drive and another critical drive on my desktop Mac, as well as the boot drive on my iMac. The iMac is far less critical, so i just take the backup drive up there periodically to run a backup.

If there is a failure or some kind of problem, I can just boot from the backup drive and restore. This is a savior when an old drive is dying or has gotten somehow corrupted. Also, the idea of periodically restoring is a good one. This allows you to do a complete wipe of the drive (zero data) and start clean from the backup, which always seems to improve performance.

Also, since I now have such an extensive iTunes setup and am using the iMac as a music server, I have a dedicated internal drive for iTunes with a dedicated firewire drive for backup. it all works great, lets me do exactly what I want and is far more flexible than Apple's solution.

Re: Backing up

TM and superduper are intended for different markets. If Apple released something like superduper I'd bet the majority of people wouldn't use it so they opted for a more simplistic approach that does what the majorty need in a fashion that's virtually idiot proof. Sure use techie types want more control and for us there's other solutions if you so choose. Windows has had a customizeable backup solution built into its OS for years....and VERY few people even know its there never mind use it.

Re: Backing up

Which never personally worked for me when I had a system crash
and needed a restore.

Re: Backing up

On windows I recommend Sync Toy.

On OSX I recommend superduper. SD works great for system restores but I had even better luck with the built in OSX backup tool when I moved my internal drivre to an external USB drive, replaced the internal drive with one double the size, then returned the data from external to internal. Couldnt have been easier. Winclone allowed me to take my Bootcamp slice with me too, that was REALLY slick!

Re: Backing up

SuperDuper on Mac has always worked perfectly for me.

Simple to use and simple to restore!

Re: Backing up

Yeah, not sure why SD's system backup and restore failed for me, it was probably user error, but the built in OSX one worked and I am not anticipating having to do it again, so won't be investigating it further =)