[lwdesign]

For years before Time Machine came on the scene I've been using Bounceback Pro from CMSproducts.com for daily unattended backups. It's been a lifesaver several times for accidentally deleted files and the occasional corrupted file. As soon as I put Leopard into all 4 Macs in my office I'm planning on doing the following:

1) Continuing to do Bounceback backups for each machine on individual USB or Firewire external drives.
2) Purchasing the 1TB Time Capsule and having Time Machine backup to that drive and to an external USB drive connected to Time Capsule wirelessly.

Bounceback is able to produce bootable incremental copies of each drive, so if a drive in one of my Macs dies I can simply swap out the drive in just a few minutes from the Bounceback external disk. This obviates the HOURS of downtime that using Time Machine would entail to recover my files.

I'll use Time Machine's features to recover the occasional lost file, but won't even think about using it to restore a whole drive in the event of a crash. Copying over 100GB of data, even over the fastest wired connection is still very slow and not practical in a busy working environment. Time Machine and Time Capsule are terrific for occasional lost files but will leave you hanging with a dead computer until you laboriously copy all those hundreds of gigs back, which just ain't practical.

[ChopinBlues]

Quote

Everyone is talking about how long it takes to do the initial backup. Who cares, it's a one time thing. The question should be, how long does it take to RESTORE an entire system, and that is where the Time Capsule completely fails. Restoring your entire system, even if wired up, takes WAY too long to bother with.

Actually, the restore time is pretty much irrelevant for the same reason that the 1st backup time is, in fact, even more so, the reason being, that you hopefully will never have to do that even once. A complete drive failure or other total trashing is quite rare, and should never happen to the typical user. I have owned many many macs over the last 20 years, usual several at a time, and only once have I ever had to do a full restore, and that was due to a really dumb mistake on my part, not a drive failure

And yes, I'm sure the one guy in a million this happened to is now going to chime in here, but that does not disprove the essence of my argument. I don't even see that as the main purpose of Time Machine. I think TM is much more useful as a way to recover the occasional misplaced, or accidentally deleted file. So don't worry about the time -- let it run in the background overnight, which is what I did for the initial backup.

[lwdesign]

Restore time is completely relevant in the event of a disk crash.

The whole thing about disk crashes is that they are never planned-for occurrences, yet they do happen. I've been a professional Mac user since 1989 and in that entire time I've had 4 drives crash utterly, which works out to 1 drive every 4.75 years. Of those crashes, 2 of them were without backups in the early years (shame on me) and 2 were with backups in place (when I had my nose rubbed in it enough). The first 2 times were absolute nightmares, full of great gnashings of teeth, rending of clothing, and many, many apologies to clients, and weeks of extra work attempting to recover, rebuild or re-create those lost files. Many of the files were irreplaceable and caused thousands of dollars in lost revenue and time.

Disk crashes are unfortunately not "one in a million", especially in a very busy work environment on machines that get heavy use. So telling someone that it's not likely to ever happen is whistling in the dark and hoping for the best. Crashes do happen and having backup solutions in place is just good sense. Some professional users have 2 backup solutions, just in case the first backup ever goes bad.

If your files aren't irreplaceable then feel free to make no backups at all. But remember that if your files ARE valuable (whether personal or business) and the unthinkable ever DOES happen to you, a backup will save your life, time and money. If Time Machine is all you need and you don't mind waiting hours to restore your whole drive, go for it. I will rely on a dual backup system with Time Machine and Bounceback Pro (or some other standalone backup software that creates bootable disks) on separate drives to save my bacon from the horrendous hardship of a disk crash should it ever cross my path in the next 4.75 years (or so).

[Edgejr]

I had heard that TimeCapsule does not work with FileVault encrypted directories (at least while logged in)? Anyone know if this is true? For someone who purchased one and it's being shipped, I must say this is a bit troubling. The concept of wireless backup is made for laptops. And anyone using a laptop and not encrypting their home folder is asking for their personal information to get stolen. I just can't believe that Apple would release a backup device that won't backup their own technology properly.

Edge

[Graphos]

I agree 100% with you. I have had my share of TOTAL DRIVE FAILUR. Fortunately I have lost very little work because I keep very good backups. With the advent of DVD burning this has simplified matters a bit. But suffice to say that in more the one occasion I have had to open a Mac, take and discard an unusable drive, placed a new one and restored my data. A HD is just like a light bulb with a finite life cycle. So the better your backup, the less problems you will face. I have done this on a Windows NT RIP server, twice, now that was a nightmare each time!!!

[MrLizard]

"Disk crashes are unfortunately not "one in a million", especially in a very busy work environment on machines that get heavy use. "



This is a product aimed at consumers, not busy work environments on machines that get heavy use.

The type of environment you describe above would have far more sophisticated back up and recovery solutions, such as a RAID setup.

For home users, such catastophic drive failures are far, far rarer. Maybe not one-in-a-million, but still extremely rare.

Time Capsule is marketed as a way to recover the odd file. Whilst entire system backups are possible, the odds of needing to do that as a home user are going to be somewhere between never and rare.

[wassimj]

Thanks for the reply, but Gizmodo is reporting they had a problem attaching a printer. Hopefully, it was just a glitch or perhaps something wrong with the printer they chose to test. http://gizmodo.com/3...ng-no-surprises

I look forward to the full review. Many thanks.

[davidf]

I feel like I have been scammed.

[gpasq]

Restore time is irrelevant? How can you say that? When I'm backing up, it takes a LOOOONG time, but at least it runs in the background. When I'm trying to restore I'm DOWN. Unproductive. Non functional.

If you want to spend $500 to do a 15 hour restore and be down the entire time, go ahead. Seems silly to me. I feel it's better to spend a couple hundred for a USB attached drive and be back up and running in under an hour. But hey, that's just me.


[quote name='ChopinBlues']

Actually, the restore time is pretty much irrelevant for the same reason that the 1st backup time is, in fact, even more so, the reason being, that you hopefully will never have to do that even once. A complete drive failure or other total trashing is quite rare, and should never happen to the typical user. I have owned many many macs over the last 20 years, usual several at a time, and only once have I ever had to do a full restore, and that was due to a really dumb mistake on my part, not a drive failure

And yes, I'm sure the one guy in a million this happened to is now going to chime in here, but that does not disprove the essence of my argument. I don't even see that as the main purpose of Time Machine. I think TM is much more useful as a way to recover the occasional misplaced, or accidentally deleted file. So don't worry about the time -- let it run in the background overnight, which is what I did for the initial backup.

[Scott_Gardner]

I would feel scammed also, except that I've never gotten a decent sustained transfer rate with a USB drive attached to my AEBS (wireless or wired).
With four different external drives (using three different USB chipsets), the transfer speed starts off great for the first few seconds, then plummets to a trickle and stays there until the transfer completes. So I wouldn't want to use the AEBS/external USB combo for wireless Time Machine backups anyway. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like the transfer speed to the Time Capsule is any great shakes either.

[Glenn_Fleishman]

gpasq said:

Restore time is irrelevant? How can you say that? When I'm backing up, it takes a LOOOONG time, but at least it runs in the background. When I'm trying to restore I'm DOWN. Unproductive. Non functional.

If you want to spend $500 to do a 15 hour restore and be down the entire time, go ahead. Seems silly to me. I feel it's better to spend a couple hundred for a USB attached drive and be back up and running in under an hour. But hey, that's just me.

Additional problem I see here: with an integral, internal drive in the Time Capsule, if you want to do a restore, you're always limited to the maximum network speed mediated by the CPU limits on the Time Capsule (for handling AFP and so forth). With an external drive, either on a Time Capsule or networked via another Mac, you could restore a computer (or migrate it) just by plugging that drive directly into the computer and getting USB 2.0 or FireWire 400/800 speeds limited only by the local CPU and bus speeds.

Do folks agree that that's wortth considering? As I look at Time Capsule, I'm struck by how seemingly limited it is compared to an external drive attached to one of your Macs on a network.

[dduff617]

i already have both an airport extreme-n and an always-on osx server running. i'd like to be able to use one or both as backup servers with (very) large disks attached. here are some questions i would like to see answered:

what protocol does time machine ™ use to talk to time capsule (TC)? i.e., is it afp, smb, some special variant of them, or something else?

is there some particular set of afp or smb functions (open, close, read, write, seek, delete, etc.) that TM uses to an unusually large degree? does it always just open one big image file on the remote disk, as reports seem to indicate?

is there something about the filesharing implementation on a TC which somehow enhances the reliability of TM? i.e., there has been talk of that possibly writes don't return until data has been written out to disk (vs. just to cache, for example). this might also explain why performance is slow relative to a normal file server.

if TM performance is enhanced in some way (i.e., better reliability) by a special implementation/configuration of filesharing in TC (such as write-through caching or something), is this enhancement something that can be achieved on a regular osx fileserver? is it a property of AppleFileServer (or smbd or whatever) or is it a property of how the drive is mounted on the server? or both?

does an afp server have to be configured on the server side to support TM when the share is set up? (probably) ...or is there some kind of AFP request that can be used to enable it? (seems unlikely)

does achieving TC-like functionality depend on the drive hardware being used (e.g., "server-grade" hard drives, etc.) as was hinted in the pre-release product description? seems unlikely, but if so, how?

[1FCC]

I completely agree! I bought an Airport Extreme and an external hard drive for just this purpose. The combination worked perfectly in Tiger, but not in Leopard. Someone told me that Apple removed this capability at the last moment in Leopard. I suspect for the sole purpose of helping Time Capsule marketing. I hope others will join in to help get this problem corrected. I bought the Airport Extreme in good faith so I could easily backup on WiFi and not have to have a cumbersome external hard drive attached to my MacBook. Apple needs to give us some help here!

[Glenn_Fleishman]

Folks, reader John Guidry gave me a tip via email when I asked him about his superior networked performance sing AFP.

In the Terminal, enter

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

(Provide an administrative password when prompted)

This setting changes the TCP/IP stack -- the Internet protocol for handling data backups over a network that's used by AFP by default for several OS releases -- so that it no longer waits for delayed acknowledgements from the device on the other end of the connection.

This change boosted a Time Machine backup from 15 Mbps to 66 Mbps (over 8 megaBYTEs/second or half a gig a minute). (The overall speed depends on how many small files are involved, too, since AFP is always poor with small files being copied.)