chhotii: (Default)
chhotii ([personal profile] chhotii) wrote2008-01-02 09:21 pm
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It's official: I hate Apple.

Oh, Time Machine held out such promise. And it seemed so brilliantly simple, I thought, what could go wrong?

Plenty.

1) Learn from folks that have been doing backup software (such as Retrospect) for years: If you get stuck backing up one file, just log the error, move on to the other 8,362 files that need to be backed up.

2) Which means... Oh yes, you are going to need a log! Shit happens, get over it, don't blithely assume that everything will always go perfectly, and give me a log! (Yes, truly dire events usually get mentioned in Console, buried somewhere with all the other error messages from everything else. But having to dig around in that mess makes me a whole lot less productive than when using Retrospect, which has its own dedicated log.)

3) And if I'm going to be reading the log (even if you do try to hide it in Console) you have to demystify the error numbers. Error -1101 doesn't tell me anything. Retrospect, in contrast, has a web page listing error numbers, telling what they mean and why you might get each one. Don't be in such denial about the possibility that errors might occur.

4) And when errors do occur, and f**ks up the backup... Could you give us some tool that fixes the backup? Deleting the backup, re-formatting the drive and starting over from scratch is not acceptable.

5) Given that an error might mean backups all gone... It makes us really really frightened when the backup status says "Preparing..." with barber pole strips on the progress meter for an hour. It scares the crap out of me, actually. Now I understand that sometimes it has to check the entire file system before it can figure out what it needs to back up incrementally. But couldn't it tell us that that's what it's doing, and give a progress meter for that process? Otherwise it just looks like it's stuck.

6) Apple Knowledge Base article says that computer names should only contain letters, numbers, and a couple of punctuation symbols (. and _ probably). But... the computer gives itself a name that violates that rule by default: the name defaults to something containing a space and a ' (for example "Alex's Computer"). Yes we can re-name the computer, but you didn't test this on computers with default names? What kind of monkeys are running the testing lab out there?

7) Speaking of testing... Did they notice this week that last month's label on the star field timeline is "December 2008" on any machines? I noticed. Uh, December 2008? If Time Machine can pull up data from December 2008, wow, I'm impressed. (And it sure would save us a lot of money if we could just pull a year's worth data out of the star field rather than have to pay subjects, book rooms in the research center, buy supplies...) But, no, dingbats, it's not a time machine, it's a bug.

Retrospect has bugs too, but Retrospect doesn't blithely assume that nothing will ever go wrong. I can work with Retrospect. With Time Machine, all I can do is bang on the desk in frustration.

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