Viktor Petersson.com
Time Machine on Mountain Lion
I’m not sure if I’m the only one having issues with Time Machine, but it has been completely broken for me since I upgraded to Mountain Lion. As you can see above, Time Machine basically freezes and reports outrageous ETA statistic.
What is strange is that I did a fresh install. I do have FileVault2 activated on both the Time Machine-drive (which is brand new) and my internal drive. That should work fine, as I used the same setup on Lion.
At this point, I’m just waiting for 10.8.1 to be released (the developer preview is already out) and hoping that it will solve the issue. Other than that I’m out of ideas. I’ve formatted the Time Machine drive a few times just to ensure that it wasn’t a filesystem issue. Heck, I even ‘securely’ formatted it and wrote zeros all over the drive just to be safe, but still no change.
The one other thing that I’m thinking may be related is that the external drive used is a USB3-drive. Perhaps that is causing trouble for my MacBook Pro (MacBookPro8,2).
Update: Looks like i’m not alone with having this issue.
Update 2: After struggling with this annoying issue for a few weeks now, I decided to try using my NAS as the Time Machine-target. Since you can encrypt your remote backups, I thought I’d give it a shot. While it started out fine and copied about 1.5GB of data, it then stalled. I guess this proves that there weren’t anything wrong with my USB-drive and that the issue is with Time Machine’s engine.
Update 3: After a reboot and running ‘Repair disk permission’ (in ‘Disk Utility’) on the system drive, I was able to successfully backup my drive on the NAS. I hate to not be able to share a solution to all the other people who were having the issue, but it seems to work for me. As much as I’d love to see if it also works with the USB-drive, I do not want to jeopardize anything right now.
Update 4:: It was probably unfair to blame this on Apple. It turns out that my SSD was giving up on me. Unlike magnetic drives, there was no physical way to tell. No clicking noises, and no obvious write errors. Instead the disk appears to have failed silently and caused Spotlight’s indexing to fail. That in turn caused Time Machine to fail. I’ve now switch out the drive for a brand new one, and the issues appears to have gone away.
I use rsync for backups. It’s finished in 13 secs over Wifi and keeps incremntal updates just like time machine. Strange that any Linuxer can do this in 10 lines of shell code and Apple can’t do it at all.
I call this script adamsBackup, after its author:http://michaeldadams.org/projects/backup/
Who said I don’t use both? Rsync is great and I use it every day, but getting it to the same level as Time Machine (with rolling backups and space-saving symlinks) requires *a lot* of work. That’s definitely not something a 10 line shell script can offer.
Also, the beauty of Time Machine is that you can restore an entire system with it (including system settings). That’s something you won’t be able to do easily with rsync (unless you start cherry picking).
I can however recommend Carbon Copy Cloner though. It is using rsync as the backend, but does a few other things on top of that. The cool thing with it is that it can create a fully bootable drive (including rescue partitions).
I was actually sure that you were using both with your level of unix experience. I’m more surprised that you put up with TM. Your system preferences are in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration. Adam’s script is currently keeping 3 increments. rsnapshot could work if you need more than that, but needs to be initiated on the server-side and won’t work behind a foreign NAT, I believe.
Sure, you can use as many instances as you’d like with rsync, but you still don’t get any de-dup like you do with Time Machine out-of-the-box.
LIke I said, I use both Carbon Copy Cloner, rsync, *and* Time Machine. Until now, I haven’t had any issues with Time Machine.
Also, I really doubt that *all* system settings reside in that file. Most likely there are snippets of settings scattered across the file system. However, since Time Machine already takes care of that, I don’t need to worry about it.
Another issue with backing up over SSH is that you can’t (easily) encrypt your data. It’s encrypted while being transmitted, but not on disk. I personally encrypt all my backups (regardless if I use Time Machine, rsync or Carbon Copy Cloner). Otherwise, what’s the point of using FileVault2 if your backups are unencrypted.
For local backups on a USB-drive time machine is the way to go of course. Over ssh I encrypt the whole backup drive with LUKS and put that on RAID1. Maybe at some point zfs or btrfs can do both jobs.
I’m having a similar issue. I have an MBPro (early 2011) with 10.8.2 installed. I have a 3 TB Seagate firewire drive advertised specifically for Macs (the silver drive), and this freezing seems to happen to me at odd times. I notice Outlook stops responding, and then I try to force quit, and activity monitor freezes up, and I get the spinning beach ball and then nothing works, except for my win 7 virtual machine. Then I notice that time machine has been going all this time, backing up 320 GB out of 320, and just keeps going, no change in the numbers. I actually have to power cycle the mac. I disconnected the external drive to see what happens, and sure enough, stable as a rock, no issues. So Houston, we have a problem.
Yeah, I’ve had a somewhat similar experience. Just yesterday I tried to do a Time Machine backup against my NAS. At first I just left it running for a few hours and it had copied a whooping 2MB when I got back. After rebooting however, Time Machine resumed just fine at a reasonable pace.
I have the same problem with OS X 10.8.2 – it starts out ok but then freezes up. Sometimes that prevents me logging in again. Then it can’t stop the backup (although no progress is being made with it), nor can finder eject the disk.
I got a bit of improvement by killing antivirus processes, but it still got stuck. Finally… disable screensaver in system prefs, and uncheck ‘sleep disks when possible’ in the energy saver section seem to prevent crippling freezes and allow backups to complete.
Often hard reboot of system (ugh) is necessary to get out of beachball hell. I mean, how does one politely remove a drive which isn’t responding?
I fully agree that TM when it works is a really great system, and yes I use shirt pocket’s Superduper as another full backup system, but that is much less convenient (no hourly/daily/weekly/monthly schedule built in).