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This is not valid criticism of Apple or the product itself. The overwhelming plus is the release and thereafter small 'undocumented' enhancements are brought to bear.

Tru Dat!!!

In the article they are stating that Apple killed the support for backing up to a network share?

Quoted from the apple website
" . . . . Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices."

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

Am I missing something here?

Time Machine working fine for me. over 600gig being backed up.

Time Machine didn't do sh!t for me!
I tried to go back to when APPL was $50.00......

Why doesn't this surprise me?

Apple has been notable absent on the fine details lately.

1: Not updating the open source components of Mac OS X to keep up with security issues.

2: Putting out Lepoard in order to sell off outdated hardware.

3: Glossy screens.

4: Bricking hacked iPhones.

Where the hell does it end?

The abuse is terrible!

(i'm joking of course)

He's right, you know.

I've lost my protective coating!
Is that why I have a tail? Or am I just sitting too close to myself?

Hell.

"Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices"

This statement is not completely true. We have machines that can't see other machines even if they meet the requirements. Some can see only the boot drive on the other machines.

Time Machine can see a drive one minute and then not see it the next minute.

I assume 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 will correct these problems.

- Brian Allen

The vital phrase here is "network share".

Don't be an ass Max..

What Apple HAS achieved with OSX has never been done before...it's 32bit, 64bit, Intel AND PPC, and it brings in ZFS and numerous other under the hood changes.

No other operating system can come close to what Apple is achieving with this and instead of whining and moaning you ought to be saying how frigging AMAZING the thing works AT ALL...

Excuse the shouting but jeeeze...

Personally, I'm very impressed by Time Machine so far. It has been making incremental backups of my 40GB Home directory for about ten days, yet the total size of the backup directory is about the same size as the original source directory.

One day I was in the middle of manually cloning my boot drive when Time Machine started its automatic hourly backup. To my surprise, both copying operations proceeded smoothly to completion with no complaint and no problems afterwords.

From where I stand, Time Machine appears to have been very thoroughly tested and seems to be working like a charm.

To those who are upset with Apple for not including wireless backup in the initial Leopard release: What kind of moron writes off an otherwise brilliant product because of a single missing feature?

Time Machine has been working great for me as well. Over 400 gigs from two internal drives in my PowerMac G5. Of course my drives don't have weird ass names with uncommon characters and all my drives are HFS+.

Time Machine is a pretty revolutionary technology -- to expect Apple to get it "perfect" on the .0 release is flattering, but unrealistic. The vast, vast majority of users have had little or no trouble implementing it (including moi). By the time we get to 10.5.2, or thereabouts, the residual issues will be fixed and, in all likelihood, the ability to back-up to a network storage device shared over Airport will be restored.

In short, Mike Mihalik's concerns may be valid, but that does not make them meaningful. Nowadays, computer operating systems are not snapshots, but evolving works. In my book, Leopard is unquestionably the best OS I have used in almost 30 years of PC experience. That is a great place to start, and if Apple's track record is any indication, it will only get better.

I have had zero problems with TM on a new iMac here. My MacBook did have problems such that it took 24 hours to back up just 2 GBs. I reinstalled Leo as an update (the original install was an A&I;) and it's been working fine ever since. But both are to the cheapie Iomega HD's. No network attempts yet until I hear all is well with it.

I totally agree with this guy's assessment.

A good portion of us out here are on laptops all day, and the thought of being tied down by a wired "Boat Anchor" external drive is hardly what I would call cutting edge!

Being able to back up to a LEGITIMATE NAS, seems like a no-brainer, but as the guy pointed out, there were obvious stability issues that forced Apple to pull the feature at the last minute.

As soon as I learned that TM did not support a TRUE NAS, my desire to upgrade vanished.

Between that and a host of other issues, I am content to continue to use Tiger for the foreseeable future, and Super Duper will have to serve as my Network backup solution.

No problems with TM. MacPro, and MacBook. Daily backups from drives totaling over 2 TB.

I wonder what I'll do, though, if I have to restore to another machine?

Gonna keep making "static whole-file" backups weekly.

@ Macaday

I agree with you, the under the hood changes that Apple has delivered with Leopard is completely outstanding. The 32/64 bit support is very difficult to achieve, along with the ZFS support...

Not to mention making Leopard UNIX compliant. I am surprised they did not break more things than they did.

No OS ever made comes close to what OS X Leopard has accomplished. They will earn out the bugs over time.

Apple has set the quality bar so high, that they are not allowed to have the occasional mishaps.

Its easy to say test for everything, and every possible user scenario, but in practice its very hard to do. Some test can't be done until the rubber hits the road.

Go Apple! Leopard is the best general purpose OS on the planet! Can anyone name a general purpose OS that is better?

I didn't think so....

"how frigging AMAZING the thing works AT ALL..."

you're right dickwad, most people are surprised that the BSD / Mach university research project / Apple kludge that you call an operating system works at all. Fortunately nobody uses it for any serious work, so it's limitations are not likely to be discovered by most Apple customers.

When will my mac be upgraded to 10.4.10?

10.5.2 will be out before it happens I guess.

Oh well.

wf

You're a jackass.

And a liar.

I really don't care how Apple screwed this up. I want them to fix network share backup soon. I want to get my LaCie RAID 1 1TB NAS for Christmas and this shit is screwing my plan!!!!!

Just my $0.02

I've never trusted things like this. The way I back up? I find what i want to backup and stick on an external HD or a DVD/CD/usb stick MANUALY so I know whats going on. What happens if you have a power failute during a backup or you/your kid trips and yanks the cable out (be nice if usb/firwire headphone etc were all magnetic to)
It's like computer controled cars they're supposedly working on. Do you realy trust a machine that much that you would get in your car fall asleep and trust it to get you home safely?

I would be interested in other people's experience on how much HD space might be needed compared to the original to be backed up. In know it will vary, but if we took a quick survey, might help many of us.

Wow. Lots of idiots here tonight.

Don't like Apple's solution, use Retrospect.

I'd like to see the average user try that.

GizmoDan,

Here's mine:
Time Machine default install (hourly backups for past 24 hours, daily backups for past month, weekly backups until disk is full).

Oldest backup: Oct 27, 2007. Last backup: less than an hour ago.

Time Machine is currently using 101.6GB of an external drive to backup a MacBook Pro's drive containing 92.2GB of data.

I agree (sort of) with you Macaday, but how could you not see that Max was joking? Maybe if you read the post you might notice the "(i'm joking of course)" at the bottom.

I'm not experienced with TM yet, but am i reading this right? If i buy/have a mac I'll have to buy an external HD of at least equal or more size just for a backup? DVDs arn't dead yet are they. i normaly just want the files backed up music/pics/vids/work whatever, I don't need the whole machine backed up do i. And yeah, seems nice to have every day backed up, but on one HD? What happens when that blows up, wise to keep back ups on discs, no?

TM is working on a G4 Sawtooth tied to a FW as the backup. Also my PB is being backed up to the same drive via the network.

Remember guys this is a 1.0 software - mileage may vary.

It's not just wireless drives that don't work with Time Machine. My LaCie 500GB USB drive doesn't show up in Time Machine, despite being correctly formatted and mounting fine in Finder.

Looking forward to 10.5.1 - this initial release remains very buggy (not just with Time Machine).

try connecting via fw

my backup was fooked up the other day - tm is most def a work in progress

hey - it even crashed steve forstall's demo !

Which is exactly why you don't use .0 of any software. People should know better.

@flappo: Unfortunately it's USB only
@Emil: So, it's OK for Apple to release buggy software in the first version, but not Microsoft with Vista, right? My bad.

Obviously Leopard is crap and Vista is perfection!

-Not-

I'm using a LaCie d2 Quadra 320GB external drive for my backup. Its connected via FW800. So far no problems. However, I have not restored a lot of my data so my external drive is inadequate for future use. So now I'm looking at a FW800 750GB drive. Thats more than $300. I'd rather put the $300 towards network storage so my desktop and 2 laptops can access the data.

I'm really hoping for a NAS system that uses ZFS. Hopefully, we'll be seeing them in the spring. Otherwise, I may be building my own server running OpenSolaris with an eSATA card and some eSATA disk enclosures. Hopefully, by then, Time Machine will have official support for network storage.

I'm not thrilled about Time Machine requiring hooks in HFS though. I hope Apple has been testing it with ZFS because ZFS is the holy grail of file systems.

The + is for journaling, that's what TM is using. HFS+ is the only FS that's journaled AND fully supported by ALL OS X Macs. ZFS lives on the journaled structure, or at least that's one of the things I understand about it (oh and the "pool" of disks). There's a developer beta for full ZFS support on ADC if anyone wants to give it a shot

Two words: Super Duper.
"ever" as in all I will ever need.

I think some of you just don't get it. Time Machine is one of the greatest little features ever on a mainstream personal computer operating system. To be able to simply tell your Mac to backup up its entire contents to another drive, with the push of a button, is what many users, if not the majority of users needed. Some people backup to DVD, CD, whatever, but the overwhelming majority of them DO NOT BACKUP their systems even though THEY KNOW THEY SHOULD! Take it from someone who sees it all the time as a Mac/PC Systems Administrator. I use Retrospect at my full time job to backup to DLT tape everyday, and make no mistake, it is nowhere near as easy to backup and recover data from. Not impossible, but the average user will hate the interface and the fact that you have to make up backup scripts at all. And oh yes, Time Machine does in fact backup up over a network along as the share is a real share and you actually have privileges to write the the network volume. Its silent, its unobtrusive, and its simple–nuf said!

Hell, I don't know what he's complaining about: I bought a 500GB hard drive from them just FOR Time Machine...

Mountain out of a molehill…

Under OS 9 I used to name files with forward slashes…that's a no-no in the unix world. This is the same deal.

As far as the MBR on external drives…why? if it is to be used as a data drive, you really don't need that do you? If you are going to boot from the drive, you'll probably set that up in another program. (I'm with "Cuz TTM", I like SuperDuper).

Maybe LaCie could start providing decent power suppply units they sell with their external hard drives. We have quite a few LaCie drives at work and they keep dying one after the other...