Leopard's Time Machine, CS3, and Lightroom

[mitchell]

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When Leopard first came out, Time Machine didn't work well with CS3 or LR, if I remember correctly.

 

Has this been solved? Are there users happy with Time Machine backing up their photos?

 

I have Leopard, but have avoided TM until now. Should I try it now?

 

 

Thanks,

 

MItchell

[Marquinius]

I'm not even betting on time machine to back up my photo's. One of the quirks is that when the disk is full, it will start throwing away the oldest backups. Oh? and how does it know if that back up is not important? I mean: I sometimes (after having rejected lots of them directly after the shoot ) reject pictures, but still keep them on my original database. You never know what you can do with them later.

 

My setup is:

 

I put all my original shots on external disks and work from one of them. So I have:

- one 500 Gb "working" external database with original pics and developped pics

- one 500 Gb "back up" external database (of the working database's originals only)

 

 

Backups of developped pictures to the second disk are made regularly BY HAND to keep the chance of dataloss as low as possible.

[carstenw]

Time Machine is not a backup mechanism in the sense of archives. You should do that separately. Time Machine is, as far as I can tell, just a nice GUI on top of the .snapshot mechanism known from industrial-strength unix, ie. it is a short-to-medium term recovery mechanism. What it does, it does really well, but it is not an archive.

 

I use Lightroom and Time Machine and have no problems.

[mitchell]

Thanks Carsten and Marco for the helpful clarification. I thought it was backup.

 

Best,

 

Mitchel

[ceflynn]

When the Time Machine volume becomes too full, it throws away the oldest version of a file of which there are multiple versions, such as your Apple Address Book database files, which are usually modified oftern. It does not throw away any file of which there is only one copy, as long as the file is still on the original volume.

[ceflynn]

AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Time Machine [Page 1]

[carstenw]

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I should clarify a little, I think, since my first comment was a little too terse. If all you want from a backup solution is a second copy of important files, on a separate disk, then Time Machine gives you that. However, traditional backup approaches leave you with a series of timed backups ranging back until you started it, probably in the form of CDs or DVDs. Some people want that, but what most people actually prefer is a second copy of existing files (as long as it has existed for an hour or more; Time Machine's granularity), and the last few revisions of a file, in case you made a bad edit. This is what Time Machine gives you, but unless you save something to CD or DVD or somehow else regularly remove copies from your system and save them somewhere, Time Machine will only ever give you access to the last few revisions. It keeps the last 24 hours worth of hourly revisions, the last week's worth of daily revisions, and so on, until there is no more room.

[wparsonsgisnet]

I should clarify a little, I think, since my first comment was a little too terse. If all you want from a backup solution is a second copy of important files, on a separate disk, then Time Machine gives you that. However, traditional backup approaches leave you with a series of timed backups ranging back until you started it, probably in the form of CDs or DVDs. Some people want that, but what most people actually prefer is a second copy of existing files (as long as it has existed for an hour or more; Time Machine's granularity), and the last few revisions of a file, in case you made a bad edit. This is what Time Machine gives you, but unless you save something to CD or DVD or somehow else regularly remove copies from your system and save them somewhere, Time Machine will only ever give you access to the last few revisions. It keeps the last 24 hours worth of hourly revisions, the last week's worth of daily revisions, and so on, until there is no more room.

 

To paraphrase, TM works for word processing files but not for image archiving. Is that right?

[rwfreund]

To paraphrase, TM works for word processing files but not for image archiving. Is that right?

I think that it may be better to say that it works just fine for backup, not for archiving.

That is true for both word processing as well as image files.

-bob

[carstenw]

To paraphrase, TM works for word processing files but not for image archiving. Is that right?

It works for everything. There will always be an extra copy of every file, given enough room. But if you want *historical* archives, you need another tool. This one just has the last few revisions of whatever files you have. Btw, it works on the file-level, so there is no difference to Time Machine between images and text.

[wlaidlaw]

I have turned off Time Machine on the three Macs I have running Leopard. It slows everything down too much and is incredibly hard disc hungry. I have gone back to using my normal archiving/filing disciplines and a daily scheduled Chronosync back up. On Chronosnyc and I suspect, on most other back-up programs, you have to tick the set up box "dissect packages" in options and on the analyse screen tick the boxes display and pkgs. If you don't do this, it will do a full back up of iTunes music and iPhoto library each time, rather than just alterations and additions.

 

Wilson