Time Machine

[Bill Bumface]

Its such a great utility when it works, the problem is it almost never does.

I'm having massive problems with it not mounting/unmounting my sparse bundle properly, making my backups fail, and also making it impossible to shutdown my machine without hard powering it down.

Anyone experience any of these issues? If I look in my /volumes I often find my NAS mounted about 8 times and several time machine mounts as well. So frustrating.

I really hope it's better in the new OS.

[ma-skis.com]

try overclocking to 88 mph... that should do it

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by hulkrogan

Its such a great utility when it works, the problem is it almost never does.

I'm having massive problems with it not mounting/unmounting my sparse bundle properly, making my backups fail, and also making it impossible to shutdown my machine without hard powering it down.

Anyone experience any of these issues? If I look in my /volumes I often find my NAS mounted about 8 times and several time machine mounts as well. So frustrating.

I really hope it's better in the new OS.

What kind of NAS? Unfortunately, I think there are a lot of crummy SMB implementations out there (Apple included...), which is why Time Machine isn't officially supported on third part NAS devices..Are you stuck with SMB only, or can you set up the NAS to do NFS or ideally AFP?

[monkeyman]

I agree, definitely sounds like a problem with the flex capacitor.
I have my hard drive(non-Apple) connected as an external drive on my Airport extreme. while i do sometimes have problems with it not being able to connect to my external hard drive, it's rare and most of the time it works great.

[mykalberta]

Personally I would check the Flux Capacitor. instead of the flex. Just IMO of course.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

What kind of NAS? Unfortunately, I think there are a lot of crummy SMB implementations out there (Apple included...), which is why Time Machine isn't officially supported on third part NAS devices..Are you stuck with SMB only, or can you set up the NAS to do NFS or ideally AFP?

It's a D-Link DNS-323 which has been rock solid for me otherwise. I believe it's SMB only. If Time Machine was written properly it shouldn't matter if my disk chokes and dies half way through the backup, it would be able to resume. Fingers are very crossed they've made it more robust in Snow Leopard.

[Russic]

While I'm not technical enough to understand the problem, my time machine for the most part has been working really well. It's the sh*ts for customization though (as in there is almost none) and I hope snow leopard fixes that. Problem is I've heard nothing about time machine in snow leopard.

[sclitheroe]

If you need Time Machine to restore individual files and previous revisions, you need Time Machine. If you are just looking for a good way to back up the entire system in case you need to restore from total failure, take a look at SuperDuper - it works really well, and has relatively none of the flakiness Time Machine does working on network attached storage.

Time Machine is a great idea, implemented poorly. In a NAS scenario, you have a virtual file system sitting on top of a physical file system, and inside that, you have literally millions of symbolic links used to provide the point-in-time coherent views of the filesystem. It's no wonder it doesn't always work right.

But if you don't need the ability to go back and fetch the last X number of revisions of a document, if you only ever want the latest backup copy, SuperDuper is a good solution worth looking at.