Comments on: Time Machine on Mountain Lion

By: Michael C. Neale

Michael C. Neale — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:29:00 +0000

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).

By: vpetersson

vpetersson — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 16:16:00 +0000

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.

By: Jon Bountalas

Jon Bountalas — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:41:00 +0000

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.

By: manu

manu — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 13:06:00 +0000

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.

By: vpetersson

vpetersson — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 12:48:00 +0000

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.

By: manu

manu — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 12:37:00 +0000

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.

By: vpetersson

vpetersson — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 12:24:00 +0000

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).

By: manu

manu — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:13:00 +0000

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/