Guest guy_mancuso Posted October 25, 2007 Share #1 Posted October 25, 2007 Advertisement (gone after registration) Looks like a day away from a new Mac OS which i just ordered the family pack. now from what i have read which there is not much out there on Time Machine. It seems to me that you dedicated a seperate drive be it internal or external to copy all your data from your OS and Time machine follows your every move and backs it up to the Time Machine drive and if you delete files and such on the OS side , time machine does not delete them ( not sure about this) but my question seems to be is Time Machine acting in the same capacity as a Raid 1 mirrored drive. Anyone offer what it is actually doing and can you boot from it in case your OS fails Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted October 25, 2007 Posted October 25, 2007 Hi Guest guy_mancuso, Take a look here New Mac OS leopard. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
mjh Posted October 25, 2007 Share #2 Posted October 25, 2007 No, you cannot boot from a TimeMachine backup, and no, it’s got nothing to do with RAID. TimeMachine is really an incremental backup solution that supports not just recovering the immediately previous state, but allows you to go back in time. For example, you may have accidentally deleted a paragraph within a text document without noticing it. Even when the last couple of backups didn’t have this paragraph anymore, you could go back to a time before that fateful cut and retrieve a version with the missing paragraph intact. Provided the external drive used for TimeMachine is big enough, that is – the bigger it is, the further you will be able to go back in time. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
miami91 Posted October 25, 2007 Share #3 Posted October 25, 2007 No, you cannot boot from a TimeMachine backup, and no, it’s got nothing to do with RAID. TimeMachine is really an incremental backup solution that supports not just recovering the immediately previous state, but allows you to go back in time. For example, you may have accidentally deleted a paragraph within a text document without noticing it. Even when the last couple of backups didn’t have this paragraph anymore, you could go back to a time before that fateful cut and retrieve a version with the missing paragraph intact. Provided the external drive used for TimeMachine is big enough, that is – the bigger it is, the further you will be able to go back in time. Michael, But based on what you know, if I'm currently using a backup product (Retrospect) to do incremental backups of my Mac's internal disk to an external HDD, I could use Time Machine instead? Not having to pay for a third-party package would certainly be welcome... Jeff. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sdai Posted October 25, 2007 Share #4 Posted October 25, 2007 Timemahcine is more like a snapshot of your hard drive at a given time ... so you can always "travel" back to that point. OS X is great ... with all these command line stuff, I write my own backup script. LOL Although I haven't been an engineer for a single day, thankfully, I haven't forgotten all the programming stuff learned from school back in the early 80s. This alone, is the single biggest advantage over Windows in my point of view. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjh Posted October 25, 2007 Share #5 Posted October 25, 2007 But based on what you know, if I'm currently using a backup product (Retrospect) to do incremental backups of my Mac's internal disk to an external HDD, I could use Time Machine instead? Not having to pay for a third-party package would certainly be welcome... Retrospect gives you more control over the backup schedule, but as I personally loath Retrospect (last I looked, its user interface was horrible), I would certainly favour TimeMachine. Still it wouldn’t hurt waiting a few more weeks before making the switch, just in case there are some bugs left that escaped the beta testers. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
miami91 Posted October 25, 2007 Share #6 Posted October 25, 2007 Retrospect gives you more control over the backup schedule, but as I personally loath Retrospect (last I looked, its user interface was horrible), I would certainly favour TimeMachine. Still it wouldn’t hurt waiting a few more weeks before making the switch, just in case there are some bugs left that escaped the beta testers. Thanks for the advice. Yes, the Retrospect interface is horrible, and given that I don't need some of its features (such as the ability to back up to a network share), I'm hopeful I'll be better off with Time Machine. My home environment is quite simple: I have a G Technology RAID 1 for my photos, which will not need to interact with the backup software. But I do currently back up the contents of my internal HDD to another external G Drive (for disaster recovery/restore), and this I would favour moving to TimeMachine. Jeff. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sdai Posted October 25, 2007 Share #7 Posted October 25, 2007 Advertisement (gone after registration) Jeff, Timemachine also works across IP network and SAN storage ... any accessible drive is what they say. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrc Posted October 25, 2007 Share #8 Posted October 25, 2007 There's a full review of Leopard in the Wall Street Journal today, in which the guy calls it an "evolutionary" change. He says that "Time Machine" equivalent software is available for both Windows and Mac, and has been for some time, but this makes it easier and it comes as part of the package. He also says that Macs now make up about 20% of non-corporate computer sales in the US. It's not a RAID, but if you did Time Machine backups (only) on a large external drive, it seems to me that it would fill the same function, as least for the limited demands of photo users. That is, if your Mac crashed and burned, you could plug in another Mac and get it all back...If that is not correct, I would like to know. If that is correct, I may upgrade to Leopard sooner than I'd planned. JC Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sdai Posted October 25, 2007 Share #9 Posted October 25, 2007 I don't think the TimeMachine image is bootable, however, if you have a complete secondary image of your burnt hard drive there's nothing could prevent you getting everything back when you plug it into another working Mac. Many of the OS X stuff is not new in the Unix world, Apple keeps licensing new technologies from other companies, another cool thing is the ZFS file system licensed from Sun Microsystems ... however, it's only in read only mode in Leopard. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pgmj Posted October 25, 2007 Share #10 Posted October 25, 2007 While you indeed cannot boot from a Time Machine backup, it seems you can make a basic install and then restore everything from a TM backup. To make setting up a new Mac even simpler, Time Machine shares its data with other Mac utilities. Use Migration Assistant to copy portions of any Time Machine backup to a new Mac, or select “Restore System from Time Machine” in the Leopard DVD Utilities menu. Choose any date recorded in Time Machine to set up your new Mac exactly as your previous Mac was on that date. Also, you don't need to dedicate a whole drive to Time Machine, it just makes a folder on the partition selected. Apparently you can use several harddrives for multiple backups as well. Seems pretty sweet to me. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guy_mancuso Posted October 25, 2007 Share #11 Posted October 25, 2007 Restore System from Time Machine” in the Leopard DVD Utilities menu. Choose any date recorded in Time Machine to set up your new Mac exactly as your previous Mac was on that date. See that line seems to make me think bootable . maybe not the case but i see no reason to run a Raid 1 setup now. All i would have to do it SEEMS is reload the OS again than restore from TM to load everything including the apps and such. I have synchronize pro which i could partition a small section of a drive and make a bootable copy after i load leopard for a emergency than restore TM than re sync everything back to the main OS drive. Trying to figure out the best plan. I am reformatting a 500gb internal drive dedicated to TM right now. Than i put a bootable copy of Tiger on a external firwire drive in case all goes south during the install Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
etrigan63 Posted October 25, 2007 Share #12 Posted October 25, 2007 From what I've read, that function basically writes a complete drive snapshot from the TM storage to your primary drive. That's why it has to be done from the Restore DVD: so the primary drive is not booted and you can just overwrite the system files. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Bernd Banken Posted October 25, 2007 Share #13 Posted October 25, 2007 Restore System from Time Machine” in the Leopard DVD Utilities menu. Choose any date recorded in Time Machine to set up your new Mac exactly as your previous Mac was on that date. See that line seems to make me think bootable . maybe not the case but i see no reason to run a Raid 1 setup now. All i would have to do it SEEMS is reload the OS again than restore from TM to load everything including the apps and such. I have synchronize pro which i could partition a small section of a drive and make a bootable copy after i load leopard for a emergency than restore TM than re sync everything back to the main OS drive. Trying to figure out the best plan. I am reformatting a 500gb internal drive dedicated to TM right now. Than i put a bootable copy of Tiger on a external firwire drive in case all goes south during the install Guy, just grab an old 15 or 20GB iPod with firewire connection and put it into your safe. That's safe;) Bernd Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guy_mancuso Posted October 25, 2007 Share #14 Posted October 25, 2007 Well i do have a portable firwire drive so i can just put the leopard OS on that and store it with all my apps and settings. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jquimby Posted October 25, 2007 Share #15 Posted October 25, 2007 One thing to keep in mind, the hard drive and the back up solution are separate entities. That is you can choose to point Time Machine at anything you can afford. Use an Xserver Raid with 5+1 or just a simple external firewire or usb drive. As for restoring after a disaster, the time machine back up is not bootable. What you will need to do is use the included operating system disks and boot the machine with those, then you can restore from time machine. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEBnewyork Posted October 26, 2007 Share #16 Posted October 26, 2007 Apple insider has some good info.... Here is the link and then some snippets AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Time Machine After finding a source, Time Machine sets up a full backup. It then schedules a backup every hour. There's really no scheduling options to configure. Every day, it drops the previous day's hourly backups. Every week it drops the previous week's daily backups. That maintains a complete, extensive set of backups that balance out the demands for backup frequency versus disk space. Other backup systems commonly force the user to manage these details; Time Machine supplies the professional expertise so you don't have to think about it, and can't inadvertently set up schedules that make no sense. At the same time, it's easy to manually turn Time Machine off so that its regular backups don't interfere with game playing or other activities that demand an undistracted processor. Once you turn Time Machine back on, it simply jumps back to its schedule and resumes backing things up. The Time Machine settings in System Preferences show the time scheduled for the next backup. When that time arrives, it displays a progress thermometer during the backup, which typically only takes a few seconds, unless you've generated a huge amount of new content in the last hour. Again, that's because Time Machine doesn't scan through your entire drive looking for changes, but rather only consults FSEvents for a listing of what has changed recently. This backup frequency makes Time Machine immediately useful the first day you enable it. Delete a file or folder unintentionally, and you can nearly always immediately undo it, although it's still possible to create and destroy something within an hour and be left up the creek without a paddle. Time Machine's frequent backups are far more useful and practical than the "undelete" systems once popular among system utilities like Norton Utilities, which replaced the Trash with a system that tried to retain everything that was thrown away for later possible retrieval. Time Machine focuses on protecting the stuff you need and use, not on questioning the wisdom of everything you delete. I skipped a lot more about the technical aspects then ...... A more exciting example is a search query. Do a search for phrase in Spotlight; it might bring up Word documents, iChat transcripts, and emails related to your search. Now hit Time Machine, and you can step back through time doing that same query at every point where a Time Machine backup exists. This is an incredibly powerful and flexible way to search and find results. No other backup recovery system makes querying its archives remotely as simple and intuitive as this. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
gepetto Posted October 26, 2007 Share #17 Posted October 26, 2007 There is similar back up software from Prosoft Engineering called Data BackUp 3. It is a lot easier to use than Retrospect. The easiest part is being able to quickly access the backed up data. Retrospect makes you jump through hoops to get to the information. With Data BackUp 3 you can navigate threw the backed up data using the Finder. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
carstenw Posted October 26, 2007 Share #18 Posted October 26, 2007 This sounds very similar to the .snapshot functionality on some unix systems. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
spylaw4 Posted October 26, 2007 Share #19 Posted October 26, 2007 TM does sound exceptionally useful. I do have to say however that I'll not be installing Leopard until 10.5.1 comes out! 10.4.11 is due very shortly and that will suffice for me in the interim. I wonder where TM leaves dotmac Backup? I will still probably use that for independent scheduled backups of photo files to another drive. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
carstenw Posted October 26, 2007 Share #20 Posted October 26, 2007 Brian, did you have email trouble with dotMac recently? It was so bad for me (I lost several important emails, irrecoverably) that I switched wholesale to Google Mail. I don't like the idea of a search engine managing my emails, but broken email is even worse. I cancelled my dotMac membership, so TimeMachine is timely for me, replacing Backup. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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