[romzburg]

My understanding is that you can only pick a specific DAY for a backup if that day is in the last rolling month.
Prior to a rolling 1-month daily backup you only have weekly access, and prior to a year you only have monthly access.
Is that true? TM deletes your daily backups except for the last one in a week once a month passes?

[ttcrane]

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I'm angry. I bought an Airport Extreme recently in anticipation of using Time Machine with an Airport Disk. I still have other reasons to own it, but Time Machine was a major factor in my decision. If I would have known, I probably would have bought a cheaper router for a better value. Thanks, Apple. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif

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While I'm not exactly angry, I am frustrated. I also bought an Airport Extreme for the sole purpose of doing backups with Time Machine (this was mentioned as a feature on Apple's web-site at one time). I would not have purchased the Airport Extreme if I had known that it wouldn't work. Now that I have it, however, I am enjoying the speed and range improvement from 802.11n.
Here's to hoping this becomes a feature again through a software update.

[Chris Breen]

As someone who tried TM with a drive attached to an AirPort Extreme Base Station -- when the feature was in an earlier beta -- I should mention that it was horribly slow. In theory it's a very cool feature, in practice it was only for the very, very patient.
That's not to say that Apple might work some magic in the future that speeds things up. But my guess is that had they included it in Leopard a lot of people would have been disappointed.

[mournac]

Does TM take over the entire external drive, or is it possible to designate a particular folder on that drive? (for instance, I like to keep a set of "good" preferences for most of my applications, and I don't want that folder to be affected by any backup)

[Chris Breen]

TM creates its backup folder and puts stuff in there. You can put anything you like on the rest of the drive.

[tony_d]

Kind of curious. How does it work with the new guest account feature? I assume we can decide which accounts it will back up.

[paulburd]

I didn't see an answer to this, so I thought I would ask it again... Does TM backup other externals too, or just your internal drive? Example: You have a Macbook and Firewire drive (external A), that you work from. You attach another Firewire drive (external B) to use for your TM backup drive. Does TM backup your internal and "external A", or does it only backup your internal drive?

[sirmarcos]

I second the question about secure delete - sometimes we don't want anyone to travel back in time and find a file - we want it gone completely. Does Time Machine have any sort of "permanently obliterate this file?" Honoring secure delete seems one sensible precaution...

[OM_user]

Time Machine sounds like a really great feature. Even though it's not the most comprehensive backup system ever developed, I applaud Apple for developing a backup system that an average non-technical user can easily put to work. Most of these same people probably never backup a single file on their Macs.
My only disappointment with TM is that, as the name implies, I thought it might give me the ability to fly forward in time to locate that completed project I've been putting off doing. If Apple could only add that in, it would be a real killer feature! /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[chuckbo]

No one's been able to answer this question for me yet, but does Time Machine support multiple backup drives?
For instance, say I move my laptop back and forth between home and work. Will I be able to define a backup drive for use at home and a different drive when I'm at work? The motivation for doing this is then I have a backup that's offsite -- kind of like what I'm doing now by rotating backup cartridges and storing a set offsite that I backup with Retrospect.

[jerryny]

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"I expect rebuilding from Time Machine will be a many hour process."
I didn't find that to be the case at all when I tested it. I wiped out my boot disk, ran the installer, then chose the option to restore from the TM drive. You do need to go through a basic OS X install, but then when the migration assistant appears, you tell it to use the TM backup, and it does the rest.
Now I don't have a huge drive in my test machine, and it's only about 30GB full. But really, the time taken should be equal to this: time to restore a clone + about 15 to 20 minutes for the OS X install. So yes, it's slower. But it's not a question of hours vs. minutes.

-rob.

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Not if your internal drive has a permanment failure, then having a bootable clone means you can be up and running in seconds instead of perhaps days. This can happen to any drive at any time. If your machine is used for business then this is very important.
Perhaps the answer is to have both.

[Tony1]

Is there a preferred stratagy for MacBook users? After the initial backup, should I disable TM and then Option+DocIcon when I later connect the external drive?

[tbeaubien]

Can I use an iPod as a backup drive? My current iPod has about 20GB free and I occassionally drag my Documents folder onto it as a backup of stuff I care about. Can I just configure TM to do that for me as long as I have space?
Thanks,
TMan

[Dan Frakes]

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Is there a preferred stratagy for MacBook users? After the initial backup, should I disable TM and then Option+DocIcon when I later connect the external drive?

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There's no need to disable Time Machine. If the drive isn't connected, it simply won't back up; the next time you connect the drive, Time Machine will detect it and back up automatically.