Title: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) -Time Machine Backups

I just read an interesting bit over at Mac OS X Hints on how Time Machine is not doing a good job at backing up.

Well, I couldn’t resist testing the Hint and finding out what is going on with my back-ups.

I followed the instructions, and having changed the disk names etc. in the command, left it to run overnight (it does take a time to run…).

When I came back to my machine this morning I was HORRIFIED to find that there were 344 differences between the disk in the MacBook Pro (MacBook Pro at Amazon) and the Time Machine back-up. 344!!! That is not a back up….

Actually, it is a back-up. In the 344 files there were 174 that were not in the back-up but on the MacBook Pro (MacBook Pro at Amazon) hard-disk (HD), and the rest were in the back-up, but not on the HD(??).

When I actually looked at the files that were missing, i.e. I did a search through the list looking for the mention of my home directory (after all, what I am really concerned about is MY data, applications and the OS are ‘backed-up’ on the original install disks) I found 2 entries, and in both cases they were obscure files in caches for Xcode projects.

So, after the scare published in Mac OS X Hints I feel fairly happy with the back-up that Time Machine is keeping.