Song of The Day: 3 Strange Days - Artist: School of Fish



So the last couple of blog posts were about OS X Leopard’s installation and 64-bit support. This entry delves into Time Machine.

Although I had a few initial challenges setting up Time Machine to work, the new feature of Leopard truly, I think, brings backups to the Apple masses.

For my backup device I already had previously purchased a Western Digitial 320GB My Book with a FireWire connection for video. Since it had an extra 200GB available, I figured it would work (i.e., have enough capacity and be fast enough).



Time Machine required a reformat of my My Book

I expected to be able to connect it up to my Macs, then configure, and then copy way. However, that wasn’t the case. The Time Machine configuration required a reformat of my WD HD with the Mac OS Extended filesystem or HFS+. Since I already had about 100 GBs of data on the disc, which was using the default FAT32 filesystem, the reformatting process was a BIG pain. So much so, that I would recommend buying a new drive for backups if you can do that!

Although I consider the Mac’s filesystem to be far better than FAT32, I still would have preferred the FAT32 for my backups to spare me the problems of transferring those files.

However, after transferring the data off of the hard drive, I was able to configure Time Machine and start the backup process without a hitch. The backup process took about 5 to 6 hours for approximately 120GBs of data.



I started my iMac G5 in the morning before work and it completed by the time I came home. My laptop worked the same way, but I watched while it backed up the data one evening while comet gazing.

Afterwards, the typical MyBook orange icon turned into a Time Machine green icon.



New Time Machine icon for My Book drive

Furthermore, as a note, I could still place spurious files onto the drive with the remaining space available.

The only other issue I had during the entire process for both computers was an error dialog box when I clicked the Time Machine icon on my MacBook Pro.



One issue when configuring Time Machine

Upon investigation it looked to be related to the way I initially set up Time Machine on my laptop. I had previously configured Time Machine to use the My Book, but then disconnected the drive before the backup could start and complete due to the reformatting requirement. The reformatting never happened, and the backup, but Time Machine was still enabled. Somehow it got into a broken state.

After hitting System Preferences, disabling Time Machine, and then reconfiguring it again with the reformatted My Book, it worked correctly.




The UI, once everything is set up, is very slick. Apple lately just seems to get the user interface for applications right. :) Overall, a couple of challenges, but now both of my Macs are backed up, which were infrequently, and never entirely, backed up before.

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