This link has been bookmarked by 25 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Dec 2007, by William Woodward.
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04 Jan 09
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As Apple puts it, you can see your entire disk as it was at a given point in time. True, but depending on how far back you step to find a lost file (for example), time may rewind in increments of hours, days or weeks.
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As Apple presents the Time Machine filesystem view, you can see your system approximately:
As it was at the top of each hour today
As it was each day for the past 30 days, starting yesterday
As it was each week, starting 31 days ago, going back as far as disk space permits -
A distraught user might only be interested in the amount of data he may have lost:
If you accidentally deleted a file today, you lose up to an hour's work
If you deleted it between yesterday and 30 days ago, you lose up to a day's work
If you deleted it more than 30 days ago, you can lose up to one week's work, or all of it -
There are users even among Apple's targeted consumer population who need to think about their use of Time Machine, or who may be better off not using it at all.
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Consider the case of a home user who time-shifts television shows via iTunes, BitTorrent or another source. A sensible user deletes episodes he's already watched to conserve disk space, but when Time Machine is active, it may take a month for that deleted episode to vanish from the backup drive. If the backup drive fills before it can archive 30 days' worth of data, Time Machine flags an error and quits.
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That scenario plays out for any user or application that creates expanding or volatile files.
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A 10 GB database can be appended to your Time Machine archive hourly. A lengthy log will be appended in its entirety even if only one line is added between hourly archive runs. Deft management of Time Machine's exclusion list is essential for busy systems.
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Time Machine is archiving, not data protection. If your external drive fails, you lose all of your backed up data. Data protection that covers the failure of a storage device calls for a disk array with RAID mirroring or parity striping. If you want to archive and protect your data, which isn't a bad idea if you're a professional Mac user, use a RAID volume as a Time Machine backup device.
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Or, as I'll detail in the next entry on the subject, use Xserve as a Time Machine back-end
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01 May 08
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21 Jan 08
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11 Dec 07
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07 Dec 07
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