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Apr 12, 08 - 10:33 am Comment from: Logan

I feel compelled to make yet another whining comment about the fact that my Air Port Extreme still doesn't work with Time Machine, even though I bought it because Apple said it would. Then, mysteriously, all record of Apple saying this dissapeared, followed shortly thereafter with this "Time Capsule" solution. This might be the most openly evil thing Apple has done since I have become one of the "devotees."

agreed.

somethin' ain't right.

My guess is that that lots of people would buy a Time Capsule, just to make life easy. But those of use who bought the new AEBSn, shouldn't be left out in the cold either.

Although Time Machine "kinda' works" with my AESBn, look for a future Airport Update to disable that "unsupported" ability.

Do not trust Apple software implementation of RAID.

About 18 months ago I bought two were brand new LaCie 500GB external drives with the intent of setting them up in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration. I did this to prevent data loss when a primary drive goes bad, which happens too frequently in my experience.

A couple weeks ago I started having problems with my RAID set and the volume started to demount without warning. Although my iMac could detect the drives it was not capable of remounting them as a RAID set so I had to reboot the machine to get it to mount properly (annoying).

The Disk Repair utility detected that one of the drives was indeed bad. Not knowing how to proceed I made an appointment with a genius at the local Apple store. He was able to demote the bad disk from the RAID set and then reformat it so that Disk Repair found it good again. But he could find no way to promote it back to the RAID 1 set (this turned out to be a very good thing). The only thing that could be done was to create a new RAID 1 set with the two drives, which would wipe all the data from both drives in the process.

The genius did say that Apple’s software implementation of RAID was “not very smart” and that if I really wanted to do RAID properly I needed to buy a Mac Pro or an Xserve and get a RAID card installed (I may do this at some point). But for the time being I bought a third 500GB external drive and went home.

As I started to back up data from my good drive I began to notice that it didn’t have all the pictures, music, and other files it should have. After a panic attack, I launched Disk Warrior and scanned the formerly bad reformatted drive (380GB of data took about 7 hours). It turned out that the so-called bad drive actually had all the good data. So I started the recovery process and am still sorting through thousands of duplicate files.

Apple’s software RAID implementation failed me badly! I suggest that Apple deactivate it and tell everyone to use Time Machine instead.

So someone tell me, what happens when your Time Machine drive starts to go bad? It will eventually. Is there a migration solution out there? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

too cost prohibitive for the larger size - small size worthless....discuss...

Apr 14, 08 - 08:37 am Comment from: Ampar

"too cost prohibitive for the larger size - small size worthless"

Wouldn't that depend on how much a person earns and what each customer considers it's worth? And how many files each person needed to backup?

Apr 14, 08 - 09:23 am Comment from: MrScrith

@JWSC

I wouldn't be surprised if the software RAID is directly from Linux/BSD software RAID, though I don't know how I'd check...

One thing that several friends of mine do is make one drive the standard always used, and the other a complete backup using carbon cloner or something similer, make it a scheduled backup every night and you should be all good, then if one dies you pull it and continue using the other, no software RAID to make things complicated.