Of course you know all about Time Machine’s marquee feature—the ability to browse your files back in time—but Blogger James Duncan Davidson details Time machine’s equally-excellent-in-its-simplicity feature: restoring an entire system after a hard drive crash. The process is painless. Simply boot from the Leopard install disc with a fresh hard drive in place of your crashed drive; instead of continuing with the install process, go to Utilities -> Restore System from Backup. Then select your backup source (your Time Machine drive), choose which backup you want to restore (most likely you’ll want the most recent), then pick the destination drive (your new drive). Then it’s simply a matter of kicking back and waiting for Time Machine to do its magic. When all’s said and done, your entire system (with a few small exceptions) should be back in the exact same state you left it. I’ve already done this a couple of times myself, and frankly, it feels good. The simplicity of Time Machine really does compel you.
Category: Time Machine
Schedule Your Time Machine Backups with TimeMachineScheduler
Mac OS X only: Reschedule your Time Machine backup intervals from the default (which backs up once an hour) to a more appropriate schedule to fit your needs–anywhere from every one to twelve hours. Granted, the per-hour backup schedule means you’re that much more likely to have all your data backed up in case you run into a problem, but some people on older systems have reported performance slow-downs when Time Machine is backing up. In those cases, TimeMachineScheduler might be the perfect solution. TimeMachineScheduler is freeware, Mac OS X Leopard only.
Leopard 10.5.1 Update Coming, Here’s The List of Fixes
It looks like the 10.5.1 update has just hit, bringing with it fixes to Airport, Disk Utility, iCal, Mail, Printing, Security, Finder, and Time Machine. The big fixes that we can see are the finder network data loss problem that was reported last week, re-wording the firewall to reflect what it really does, fixing a read-only network share issue, and improving Back to My Mac functionality. Big list of changes after the jump.
Gizmodo has the list on there site it is quite extensive and all. Go check it out.
How to enable Time Machine on unsupported volumes
Although we’ve been mostly happy with Leopard, one of the features we were most looking forward to was the ability to set Time Machine to use a NAS volume like Airport Disk, thus making laptop backups wireless and sexy (well, sort of sexy) instead of wired and cumbersome. Sadly, Apple cut the feature at the last minute, but as with all things OS X, nirvana is usually just a
defaults writecommand away, and Volker Weber has got it sorted for us. Just pop open a terminal window and enter:defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1and you should be able to select NAS volumes in the Time Machine prefs. Of course, you should only re-enable this for giggles — we don’t know why Apple turned it off to begin with, and it could very well be full of bugs and hose your data. Considering some of the other glitches that have cropped up in Time Machine, we’d actually recommend staying well away from this one, but if you’re desperate, by all means — go for it and let us know how it works in comments!
Since I do not have a mac, I do not know how well this works. If anyone tries it let me know!
Leopard Disk Utility Format Issue Screws With Time Machine (But There’s An Easy Fix)
The bad news is, we have discovered a Leopard-related issue that may very well throw a monkey wrench into your Time Machine. Anyone trying to use Time Machine with a previously PC-formatted drive could be at risk. The good news is, there is an easy—albeit none-too-obvious—fix. Here’s the dilly-o:
After I upgraded my MacBook Pro to OS X Leopard, the first thing I did was grab a brand-new Maxtor USB drive and format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using Disk Utility, just like I had countless times before. As soon as I erased the disk, Time Machine popped up as promised, and asked if it could use the disk for backup. I said yes, and was on my merry way. Only I wasn’t.
Time Machine ran for a bit, and then crapped out after about 10GB. I went into Disk Utility and saw that although the partition was formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), the volume itself still said FAT32. I clicked Erase to reformat the drive, and got the format failure error you see above.
I tried this with FAT-formatted drives from Seagate, Iomega and HP as well. Each time I saw the same thing. I could reformat the partition to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and Time Machine would recognize it. Get Info would say that it was formatted correctly. But Disk Utility showed that the volume was formatted for PC. Inevitably, if the Time Machine backup was greater than 10GB, there were problems. Worst of all, if I dared try to format the volume for Mac, I would get the dreaded error, and the disk would be temporarily unmountable.
Go read the full story to find out how to fix the problem. I thought it was funny because Windows does that to!!
