OK, how many Time Machine backups can you have for one Mac? An interesting question?

Well, after recent events with a crashing MacBook (MacBook at Amazon), and the need to re-install Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (Amazon Link) (read earlier post) I wondered how many Time Machine backups could be performed for one Mac?

I have a MacBook Pro (MacBook Pro at Amazon), which I use in the office and at home, and up until now I have only had a Time Machine backup running at home. But, what would happen if I spent a number of days working on my MacBook Pro (MacBook Pro at Amazon) in the office, and didn’t get around to doing a backup when at home? All the office work would be lost…

Therefore I have decided to try and run Time Machine backups to disks at home and in the office, and so far so good. The backup appears to be working to the disk in the office and the disk at home. There is, however, one minor problem, I have to remember to go in to the Time Machine System Preferences and change the target disk between office and home, and back again, as I change locations. A bit of a ‘drag’, but I can live with it! (May be in the future this sort of problem will be solved by Apple by adding Time Machine to the ‘Location’ system?)

In early December MMISoftware upgraded a MacBook (MacBook at Amazon), belonging to one of our clients, to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (Amazon Link). This week, their machine had a major meltdown and needed a re-install of the operating system.

So, what happened to the machine? Well, I have now idea. The client said they had been using iPhoto when the machine locked up and they forced a re-start. When the machine re-booted it would get as far as the Dock launching, the Dock would then hang and crash, and the machine would not complete the boot.

I tried the usual things. I booted from a Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (Amazon Link) install disk, ran disk verification and repaired permissions. No joy. I then tried removing the Dock preferences. Again, the machine would not boot. Finally I concluded that the only solution would be to re-install the system.

When I set the client up with the upgraded MacBook (MacBook at Amazon) I also set up Time Machine and instructed them on how to use it. Luckily, they had been using it! But had not done so in the last day before the crash.

The re-install went great, no problems, and when it got to the point of asking if I wanted to ‘import’ system settings and files from another Mac or a Time Machine backup I used the backup. It worked like a charm! I just left it run, and the machine was back…. and as far as we can tell only one day of work was lost (well, a day and a half if you include the time for the ‘re-install’).

Update: One ‘weird’ side-effect of the ‘re-install’ and reset from the Time Machine backup was the next Time Machine back up took forever and some 60 GB of data was copied over. Odd.

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.

Just upgraded a MacBook Pro (MacBook Pro at Amazon)) to Mac OS X 10.5 (Amazon Mac OS X 10.5 link), and decided to run the Time Machine Backup to a new Iomega 500 GB Desktop Hard Drive (Iomega at Amazon).

I had read some reports on-line about problems with some external drives that were not formated for Macs. Even though the Iomega Drive said it was Mac compatible I still used the Disk Utility to reformat it as ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’, and then ran Time Machine.

A problem – after 3 hours and about 20 GB of data backed-up things stopped working. Data was just not transferring over. Looking at the disk with Disk Utility showed that even though I had erased the drive and reformatted as a ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ it was still showing as a ‘Dos’ disk. Weird…

A quick Google search and I found this article at Apple – (Mac OS X 10.5: Time Machine stops backing up to external disk), which seemed to explain the problem, and a solution… however, I changed the process slightly, I…

1. Fired up the Disk Utility
2. Re-partitioned the drive into two drives (use “GUID” partition for Intel Macs and “Apple Partition Map” for PowerPCs)
3. Once the partitioning was complete, I repartitioned the drive in to one part.
4. Just for good measure I erased the disk again.

Update: I don’t think the above has fully solved the problem. The graph below shows the Time Machine back-up running for nearly 2 hours. As can be seen, by 1 hour the graph plateaus and the back-up is never going to get to the 90 GB of the hard-drive.

Rate of data back-up

Another update: As a final attempt to solve the problem of the back-up not working I tried the following. I started with a re-partition of the disk:

1. Fired up the Disk Utility
2. Re-partitioned the drive into two drives (use “GUID” partition for Intel Macs and “Apple Partition Map” for PowerPCs)
3. Once the partitioning was complete, I repartitioned the drive in to one part.
4. Just for good measure I erased the disk again.

I then went in to terminal and ran the daily, weekly and monthly scripts (my thinking here was that as I had used Migration Assistant to move over all my personal data to the MacBook Pro from a back-up disk that the data/system may be corrupted in some way).

1. Opened the Terminal program.
2. Typed ‘sudo periodic daily’ (without the quotes), followed by my password, and let it run.
3. Once ‘daily’ had run, I typed ‘sudo periodic weekly’ to run the weekly script (this took some time).
4. Finally I ran the ‘sudo periodic monthly’ script.

After that I verified the disk permissions using Disk Utility and then left Time Machine to run for 6 hours. Net result, back up was done. Success! (At last.)

I now really really like Time Machine, which is part of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), as it has saved the day again…

OK, maybe that is a bit over the top as before Time Machine I was running a backup system (weekly!!!), but I wasn’t backing up as much as I do now…

For some reason my SpamSieve ‘corpus’ had become corrupt. No idea how or why, but SpamSieve wasn’t liking it. (The ‘corpus’ is used to screen emails and determine if they are spam.) Anyway, I was quite attached to my old ‘corpus’ as I had built it up over a good few years and it was around 99% accurate. Enter Time Machine. Two clicks and I had rolled back the ‘corpus’ a day and now SpamSieve is happy again!

Four days with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and what have I found?

First, I have got used to the look, and I must admit it makes sense. All the grey is a bit of a shock, but when compared to a machine running 10.4… the look of 10.5 is good…

I like ‘Time Machine’ – it may not be the most customizable back-up solution out there, but it is pretty slick. Just plug in a new external hard-drive and forget it. It has already ‘saved-my-bacon’ after I accidently over-wrote a website setting file – just did a search in Time Machine, found the file, and rolled back to it.

I am still getting the ‘PubSubAgent’ message, which is driving me nuts. In the earlier post Nate commented:

“I tracked my PubSubAgent quitting errors to my Safari Bookmarks being sync’d to my .Mac account. With that one checkbox unchecked, the “Sync” runs fine. With it checked, PubSubAgent quits.”

May be this is the problem? Must give a try….

Other moans? Something happened to my Keychain and I keep getting asked for passwords…

Work on checking out MMISoftware programs (PhotoGPSEditor and iCalMaker) is continuing… The new Xcode looks good (although the changes to Interface Builder were a shock!).