I HATE APPLE

I didn't mean to complain about CCC (it cloned my disk just fine) - was just wondering whether super duper might be a better fit for me

had a problem with superduper - if your disk disconnects in the middle of a backup (my external has a faulty enclosure or something) you'll be left with zero disk space. you need to go into /Volumes (which is not usually accessible) and delete a backup folder in order to get your space back.

SuperDuper's great but I quit using it for Time Machine. I like having old versions of stuff just in case. What's up with those of you that stuck with SD?

If your drive disconnects randomly, you shouldn't use it to backup anything! That's dangerous.

they're complementary, not replacements for each other. i use both. i clone (with SD, but you could use ccc) because (1) a time machine disk is not bootable so can't be used for emergency boot, you have to do a restore and i don't entirely trust that process. with a clone you can pick up where you last cloned (never more than four days for me) after a 30 second reboot (2) i exclude stuff from time machine that i don't want/need regular snapshots of, but do want a second copy of.

if you've got the space, you should use both. partition your external drive into one partition whose size matches that of your computer (clone), and one that is 2-3x the drive (TM). and then buy a second drive and do the same. keep one drive at work and swap them once a week.

if you don't have the space, time machine is more useful than a clone for most people.

Could one swap a cloned drive in after a crash and then use Time Machine to sort of restore from the future?

I recently had a drive die and the replacement is also making a clicking noise, so I'm seriously interested in this.

Restore from TM worked fine (I actually did a fresh install of Snow Leopard and used Migration Assistant, which performed flawlessly.) But it was time-consuming and I don't want to do it again.

also re: (1) i encrypt my TM disk, so it's doubly unbootable and slow to restore. i only use tm for recovering old versions of specific files. would never use it to restore my entire disk.

Could one swap a cloned drive in after a crash and then use Time Machine to sort of restore from the future?

yes. restore your home directory to the latest version in TM and that probably covers it, assuming your clone is not months out of date.

I also use both. Super Duper for my system and apps drive so I can always go back a day in case stuff crashes. Time machine for all my work stuff for those times where I somehow for some reason accidently delete or lose a file.

I actually did that at work today, and was working off a server. Versioning off some stuff and moving files around and thought I was done with it, hit delete, it's gone, then realized I needed it. If I really needed it I could've had the IT guys go to the tapes, but I just recreated the change that had happened between the two versions. Still there was that scary moment where I clicked on the trash thinking I can get it back then remembering that when you delete something off a server, it don't go into your trash.

does my backup strategy need improving?

I have external disk A which has two partitions. i) a CCC clone of the internal drive, and ii) a partition for music and other stuff not kept on the internal drive.

This drive is permanently attached by firewire and the backups are automated

Then I have external disk B which also has two partitions, i) a CCC clone of the internal drive, and ii) a copy of the 2nd partition of drive A.

This drive is held offsite, I bring it home once a week and copy the internal and the 2nd partition of external A to it

Should i be using time machine for some of this?

that's solid, and if you're strict about rotating it means you can always have a choice to two snapshots of any files to revert too, as well a the full clones. that's how i did it in pre-tm days.

but if you can afford the space then i would add tm to that.

I wasn't sure if I should be using time machine - and if so, in which way. Whats the advantage of time machine over CCC/superduper? (I'm not sure I need previous revisions of files)

And if i did use time machine (a 3rd partition? or 3rd and 4th?) - would i use CCC/SD to do internal to external A and then a time machine of that to external B - or vice versa - or something else? Not sure what the best combination of the two would be

if you don't need previous versions of files you don't need time machine. i think you'd find them more useful than you might imagine, but if you're sure then that's problem solved.

if you do decide to have a tm then remember the partition needs to be at least the size of the disk your backing up, but ideally a couple of times bigger (depending on what you use your computer for and how big the files that regularly change are). i do:

computer: 500gb

disk A (1TB, lives at work):
partition 1A: clone (500gb, runs on wednesday mornings)
paritition 1B: 500gb tm

disk B (2TB, lives at home):
partition 1B: clone (500gb, runs on saturday mornings)
partition 2B: tm in a disk image (so can grow up to 1.5TB, but I can also keep other stuff on that partition without affecting the tm)

A and B are not clones of each other. in fact, it's a good idea if they're not.

I have a little script that changes the time machine drive from A to B whenever either is connected (which happens every time I arrive at work or home and plug my computer in).

if you do decide to have a tm then remember the partition needs to be at least the size of the disk your backing up

sorry, needs to be at least the size of the data your backing up. e.g. my 500gb disk is only half full, and i exclude about 50gb of stuff from tm, so a 500gb time machine is plenty.

partition 2B: tm in a disk image (so can grow up to 1.5TB, but I can also keep other stuff on that partition without affecting the tm)

in my strategy, this other stuff (which i guess corresponds to your music) is not backed up. this is stuff i can afford to lose, so i'm ok with that, but you probably wouldn't be. be bringing the other disk home and cloning it weekly would be a good idea if i card about the data and my other disk was big enough.

I was thinking time machine might be more handy for stuff like ableton files. If i had a 3rd partition on external A, that could be a time machine backup just of certain things? Though I think I could probably make that partition big enought to do a TM of the entire internal

Its better to alternate externals A and B isn't it, though I'd then have to think about how I wanted to handle partition ii) on the externals

it's probably simpler if you give it one, but time machine doesn't need its own partition. you can use disk images. this allows your time machine to grow as you need it to, while still keeping the maximum amount of free space on the disk for your other stuff, rather than allocating tm space via guesswork partitioning when you first set it up. (also you can encrypt the disk image if you care about that.)

afaik time machine doesn't allow you to explicitly include files. you can only *exclude* files. so just using it for one directory is going to be tricky.

Thanks! - I think I'll see if I can try it with a separate partition (it'll encrypt the home directory anyway won't it?)

(i mean if filevault is on)

in principle, yes, but i don't use filevault, and i know it used to interact weirdly with tm. googling doesn't look good.

rip xserve

http://damnyouautocorrect.com/

pretty sure that the cultural monument Apple will be remembered for is iphone autcorrect.

(hey why couldn't I find this thread in the search? And why do I have "WARNING: Genius bar people are useless!!!!! WARNING: Wizard Jon Loves the Blinky Fucking Red Text!!!!" blinking away in the top right corner? Pologies if this has been asked a million times.)

(the blinkings disappeared. I'm not mad I swear.)

for people thinking about trying ssd via expresscard, here's some more deets: http://onethingwell.org/post/1610589228/ssd-two-electric-boogaloo

I've found that if you use Time Machine on a drive that's not partitioned or dedicated to TM, it has a funny way of messing with permissions, to the extent that it forbids you from renaming files on that drive, moving them into different folders, etc. Just an FYI, from my experience.

yes, you need to give time machine its own disk, partition or disk image. it won't coexist with other stuff.

^^^^just discovered this the other day

I would like to get an expresscard SSD to boot up from, but the area on the logic board around the expresscard slot is where I vacuumed off a resistor once, and I'm still not sure what that's affecting, and if it's the expresscard slot, I don't want to bork my computer by using the expresscard slot

hahaha

you vacuumed a resistor of your logic board?

yes. :( I took apart my mbp to replace the thermal grease, thought I'd vacuum off the dust bunnies, next thing you know a few resistors have gone off. so far around that area, the headphone output is still working, not sure about the displayport/mic input/express card slot. also I don't have applecare. hmm

pro tip: never use a vacuum cleaner to clean yer logic board. compressed air is much safer. #fuckfuckfuck

lol, well i can't imagine it hurting to try, but you never know. i don't really know what electricity is.

yeah maybe I'll pick one up. I ~think~ I noticed that the speakers started sounding shittier after I did that so maybe it was a speaker resistor. or maybe I had just gotten too used to my headphones at that point.

on the plus side, my mbp runs at ~45-50 C at idle now, when there isn't some unknown process eating up cpu cycles and making it run at 60 (I'm looking at you, flash)

i'm actually surprised about forcing TM to its own partition - a lot of internet talk said otherwise. good thing i separated them when i started

the disk image alternative is great because it saves you partitioning. the problem with partitioning is that if you're like, "hey, i don't want this disk to be 50/50 time machine/music collection" any more after a year, you are in for an ordeal or copying stuff on and off, repartitioning, etc.

the disk image is just a file that grows (and shrinks) with your time machine to take up more or less of the partition its on, without affecting the other files. and when you double click that file (or when time machine automatically opens it to run a backup) its like you temporarily have another partition.

there are two slightly fiddly things about working like this:

1) it's a pain to set up. you have to manually create an empty disk image with a filename made up of the machine name and the ethernet MAC address.
2) when you want to recover a file from the tm you have to manually mount the disk image then option-click the time machine menu bar and chooose "browse other time machines" because it won't find the disk automatically.

but in normal use, assuming you're on 10.6.5 or better, its totally transparent.

the other nice thing is that you can encrypt the disk image if you care about that stuff, e.g. you take the tm disk travelling (although it's probably a waste of time unless you also encrypt your mac's hard drive or run filevault)

u r like a next level nerd

http://wallofscribbles.com/gallery/Misc.%20Images/obama%20respect%20knuckles.jpg

l-r: gbx, caek, guy standing in for ppl that don't give two shits about backups

hahalol i am very presidential

fwiw stet knows more mac stuff than me, especially in the post-iphone era. i was on 10.5 until july, and have used someone's iphone/ipad maybe 3 times.

but i am king of (1) unix and (2) backup paranoia on this board fuiud

u cant be a king of unix until u own a recumbent bicycle

lookin at that SSD article, man I dun even know if my snow leopard cd is in the country

~hmm~

dont u mean special administrative region

your moms a special administrative region

lol

>:[

A gatrillion posts- my MBP died Unser the weight of 35K + photos. I finally got it to start again and ripped them all off. Works like dream now

can't upgrade ios to 4.2 until i upgrade itunes to version 10, which i can't do until i upgrade from tiger to snow leopard.

What happened to Lex's macbook - he was keeping us on tenterhooks?

we put the old hard drive i mentioned into it, and it works - still kinda annoying in many ways cuz i'd got used to the new 10.6 hd. on 10.4 i have to use firefox, which ALWAYS freezes and generally takes up more memory, instead of chrome (does anyone have any recommendations for light 10.4-compatible browsers?). and the version of itunes on 10.4 is pretty annoying too - for certain mp3s it has to stop and think and spin the beach ball for ~5secs before it'll play them, which rules out listening to some mixes completely.

i don't know what to do about the dead hd - there's stuff on there that i really quite need to have back, but not quite enough/sufficiently important to pay top dollar to retrieve. i've tried the freezing thing - didn't work. and i tried data warrior - the free demo tells you what data it can retrieve, and no dice there either. then i hit it a few times and that didn't work either.