10.5.3: TM still not right
Jun. 11th, 2008 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chhotiiRecently Apple released version 10.5.3 of Leopard. Since I found out about it through Software Update bugging me, *NOT* from someone complaining on a mailing list about its bugs, I went ahead with testing Time Machine again.
Verdict: Still not satisfactory.
This time I noticed, while trying to back up a computer that has a few different user accounts (the computer that Jon and Joseph both use), that if you log out during a Time Machine backup, it stops backing up. Uh... excuse me? Users aren't supposed to log out, least the backup not happen? What???????? Even more weird, the backup that was running when I logged out seems to have been invalidated, or something. Before I logged out, the progress thingie said "4.98 GB of 26.6 GB", but, after re-starting the backup after logging back in, it said "34.4 MB of 26.6 GB". If almost 5 GB was backed up before, why doesn't it say either "34.4 MB of 21.6 GB" or even "5 GB of 26.6 GB"? No credit for the 5 GB backed up before logging out?
This may be because I'm trying to back up the machine in question over the network to a drive attached to a different Mac. Perhaps a backup to an attached drive would keep on going. Not really acceptable, though: we aren't going to buy a separate large external hard drive for every computer here.
Altogether Time Machine seems to be too tied to one user's account. I've been reading a lot of forums and seen mention of problems where Time Machine fails because some file has an unknown group or doesn't belong to the user it should belong to or some such thing. Retrospect doesn't have this problem. Somehow (I suppose because an Admin user authorizes the Retrospect Client) Retrospect manages to back up everything, regardless of who owns what file.
I'd be more willing to find work-arounds for Time Machine's quirks if Time Machine seemed more trustworthy. As far as anyone can tell, if Time Machine hits an error on a file, it doesn't just log that problem and go on; it cancels that hour's entire backup. You might never get a complete backup, due to files you don't even care about, if it trips up over and over again.
Verdict: Still not satisfactory.
This time I noticed, while trying to back up a computer that has a few different user accounts (the computer that Jon and Joseph both use), that if you log out during a Time Machine backup, it stops backing up. Uh... excuse me? Users aren't supposed to log out, least the backup not happen? What???????? Even more weird, the backup that was running when I logged out seems to have been invalidated, or something. Before I logged out, the progress thingie said "4.98 GB of 26.6 GB", but, after re-starting the backup after logging back in, it said "34.4 MB of 26.6 GB". If almost 5 GB was backed up before, why doesn't it say either "34.4 MB of 21.6 GB" or even "5 GB of 26.6 GB"? No credit for the 5 GB backed up before logging out?
This may be because I'm trying to back up the machine in question over the network to a drive attached to a different Mac. Perhaps a backup to an attached drive would keep on going. Not really acceptable, though: we aren't going to buy a separate large external hard drive for every computer here.
Altogether Time Machine seems to be too tied to one user's account. I've been reading a lot of forums and seen mention of problems where Time Machine fails because some file has an unknown group or doesn't belong to the user it should belong to or some such thing. Retrospect doesn't have this problem. Somehow (I suppose because an Admin user authorizes the Retrospect Client) Retrospect manages to back up everything, regardless of who owns what file.
I'd be more willing to find work-arounds for Time Machine's quirks if Time Machine seemed more trustworthy. As far as anyone can tell, if Time Machine hits an error on a file, it doesn't just log that problem and go on; it cancels that hour's entire backup. You might never get a complete backup, due to files you don't even care about, if it trips up over and over again.
