[JoeKissell]

3dmac said:

I've been using a pair of IXmeta NetDisks NDAS attached to my Netgear MaxRange G wifi from day one with ZERO problems running Time Machine !

It's important to note that NDAS is not the same as NAS. With NDAS (only available from Ximeta and its licensees), each computer installs proprietary software to communicate with the networked storage device, handle all the configuration behind the scenes, and make the drive appear to be locally connected. If Time Machine thinks the drive is locally connected, and if the drive is formatted as HFS+ (Journaled), then it should work. But to be honest, I'd still worry about data integrity, because in this situation no Apple software/firmware has direct control over what's being written to the disk.

[nfiertel]

I have 6 TB of files that I need to back up..How can Time Machine do this or can it? Right now I manually copy every file which are image files in progress or completed to two separate external drives which when they fill up, I get yet more drives and continue the process. I have an internal cloned drive for the boot drive but essentially with the amount of data I accumulate there seems no other way to do this. Any ideas of this? Drives are relatively cheap and so I now have somewhere in the order of 25 drives with copies of most of the material on three sets and two sets of the most recent materials. Can one connect say, three hard drives to a time capsule and extend its auto back up to the total space then available?

[JoeKissell]

nfiertel said:

I have 6 TB of files that I need to back up..How can Time Machine do this or can it? Right now I manually copy every file which are image files in progress or completed to two separate external drives which when they fill up, I get yet more drives and continue the process. I have an internal cloned drive for the boot drive but essentially with the amount of data I accumulate there seems no other way to do this. Any ideas of this? Drives are relatively cheap and so I now have somewhere in the order of 25 drives with copies of most of the material on three sets and two sets of the most recent materials. Can one connect say, three hard drives to a time capsule and extend its auto back up to the total space then available?

There are companies that make multi-drive RAID enclosures you could use to create a single volume greater than 6 TB in size, but that sort of setup isn't appropriate for wireless backup. When you're talking about that quantity of data, it really only makes sense to have the array connected directly to your Mac, preferably with eSATA or some other very high bandwidth interface. If you happened to attach such an array to a Time Capsule via USB, I honestly don't know whether Time Machine would recognize it or not (I suspect not), but even if it did, this would add a volume to Time Capsule, not extend its existing volume. And backups would be mighty slow.

[pcharles]

Thats what I meant by "In a sense." In reality, even with a bootable backup, you will still have to go through the process of reformatting and restoring the failed system. Whether you restore from Time Machine, or from a truly bootable backup, I would think that process will take some time. It will still be a lot quicker than installing everything from scratch.

Has anyone done a test to see whether it takes much longer to restore from Time Machine than from another backup source?

[pcharles]

Yesterday my wife asked me about some photographs we took over Thanksgiving. I had since backed them up at work and erased them from the laptop, but amazingly I was able to to go back in time and find the pictures without the need to drive through a blizzard, uphill both directions, to get them from my backups at work. OK, it was not uphill in both directions, but it was really really snowy up here in snow country.

The really cool thing about this was that from iPhoto I started time machine and just scrolled back through previous iPhotos to some time in December when they suddenly appeared in the iPhoto window.

[pcharles]

I have to say that so far I have not had major problems with either of my Western Digital My Books, and have had more drive failures with my La Cie systems, both of which were Seagate failures, not LaCie. The only frustration I had with the MyBook Pro was that it would go to sleep, but since installing the Leopard compatible Button Manager Hack it seems fine.

[pcharles]

The problem with bootable backups is that while they get you going immediately, you are probably working from a backup that is a day or more old because most people do not make a fresh full backup every hour. I would imagine that all but the most paranoid simply make a backup once per night.

Suppose you were working on an important project all day and your drive fails sometime late in the afternoon. Which is quicker, restoring from an hourly time machine backup, or booting from a previous days backup and starting the project from scratch?

[JoeKissell]

pcharles said:

The problem with bootable backups is that while they get you going immediately, you are probably working from a backup that is a day or more old because most people do not make a fresh full backup every hour. I would imagine that all but the most paranoid simply make a backup once per night.

Suppose you were working on an important project all day and your drive fails sometime late in the afternoon. Which is quicker, restoring from an hourly time machine backup, or booting from a previous days backup and starting the project from scratch?

That's why you need both a bootable backup and Time Machine (or something else that makes archives).

[JoeKissell]

pcharles said:

Thats what I meant by "In a sense." In reality, even with a bootable backup, you will still have to go through the process of reformatting and restoring the failed system.

Actually, not usually. Very often you can simply update your internal drive, and not have to copy everything from scratch.

Quote

Has anyone done a test to see whether it takes much longer to restore from Time Machine than from another backup source?

Yes, and Time Machine is way slower than restoring a whole drive using something like SuperDuper.

[andreweh]

I read the comments to the above story with great interest. I guess I am one of the "simple users" mentioned in one of the above messages because I don't use my Mac for business, but for my own enjoyment and hobby. I have had Macintosh computers since the 512K days and my friends call me a backup nut. I have everything of any importance at all backed up on CDs or DVDs. I did however give Time Machine what I consider a good try on both an external HD and an internal partition. I found the program to be good for retrieving an accidentally deleted file, but practically useless for restoring from a backup using the Leopard install disk. I was able to boot fine after the restore and it was very easy and painless to do but the contents of many of my folders were not complete. As an example: I use AutoCat to catalog my external backup CDs etc. and out of 27 listed originally, there were 5. after the restore. In my movie folder there were 4 out of the original 12 listed after the restore. I found similar results in other folders using both external disks and internal partitions. So my opinion of Time Machine is that is probably useful for some one who doesn't backup (certainly better than no back up at all) but for me it isn't the answer, at least not yet. I certainly would not trust it in business for a critical backup.

[Dan Frakes]

pcharles said:

Thats what I meant by "In a sense." In reality, even with a bootable backup, you will still have to go through the process of reformatting and restoring the failed system. Whether you restore from Time Machine, or from a truly bootable backup, I would think that process will take some time. It will still be a lot quicker than installing everything from scratch.

But the beauty of a bootable "clone" backup is that you don't have to restore until you're ready. You just boot from the clone and use that until you have time to reformat (or replace) the original drive and restore the clone back onto the original (or new) drive. With a Time Machine backup as your only backup, a hard drive disaster means you can't get back to work for, at a minimum, hours. With a clone, you can be back up and running in a matter of minutes.

In either situation, the only data you'll lose is stuff that has been modified since the most-recent backup. Time Machine generally has the advantage here, because it backs up every hour (assuming you're using a desktop Mac, or your laptop is plugged in to AC power). Most people don't update their clones that often. Which is why I think the ideal "get back up and running" setup is a clone and a Time Machine backup. With the latest version of SuperDuper, you can even have both on the same (large) drive.

For a typical home user where lost time isn't as crucial, Time Machine will often be good enough -- and, in fact, will generally be much better than anything they had before ;)

pcharles said:

Has anyone done a test to see whether it takes much longer to restore from Time Machine than from another backup source?

Although neither method of restoring -- from a clone or a Time Machine backup -- is fast, restoring from a clone is considerably faster in my testing.

[pcharles]

Dan and Joe:

Many thanks for your responses. The only thing I don't do right now is maintain a bootable backup for my Powerbook. I had one on a Firelite 60GB that was created with superduper, but it would not boot. I'm not sure whether it was a problem with the backup or the speed of the drive. I've since outgrown that disk and have just been getting on happily with Time Machine, Synchronize Plus, and Deja Vu.

Thanks again,

Paul

[consumer_x]

Dan Frakes said:

But the beauty of a bootable "clone" backup is that you don't have to restore until you're ready. You just boot from the clone and use that until you have time to reformat (or replace) the original drive and restore the clone back onto the original (or new) drive. With a Time Machine backup as your only backup, a hard drive disaster means you can't get back to work for, at a minimum, hours. With a clone, you can be back up and running in a matter of minutes.

Even better, having a clone around is nice for when you need to send your computer in for repairs. If my notebook goes belly up, I can boot its clone from an external HDD enclosure using a family member's laptop via firewire, or pop the HDD into my work desktop and be working again.

The few times that I have had to give Apple a computer to look at, I have always made a clone immediately prior, because I may not get the laptop back or its HDD back.

Nice article and discussion!

[kbenk]

I plan to purchase a new iMac. Can I use Time Machine from my external hard drive to transfer my files and iphoto library? Will it also transfer software such as Office for Mac or will I need to reinstall on my new machine? Sorry to be so ignorant!