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The Official Time Machine Q&A Thread (Page 4)
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Mac Elite
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Originally Posted by - - e r i k - - 
The beauty of Time Machine is that it's so unobtrusive and transparent.
True, but some people just want to know it's happening.
How about a menu bar item like iSync's?
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Originally Posted by forumhound
As an aside, I find it interesting there is no real documentation on how this thing works, or if there is, it's hidden on the web somewhere. This thread was the closest thing I could find in google. But even in this thread, there does not seem to much clarity on how this app really works. Understanding exactly what's going on and when would be helpful in troubleshooting, no? Error message explanations would be nice too. The help file for TM is just insane, have u noticed? How about this one:
There are a lot of articles out there. Just google: One, Two, etc.
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The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.
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Originally Posted by Gankdawg
True, but some people just want to know it's happening.
Indeed, and those people (should) know that they need to look at
/var/log/system.log
because that's where TM tells you exactly what it's doing.
(Last edited by Simon; Feb 5, 2008 at 01:43 AM
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Originally Posted by Simon
Indeed, and those people (should) know that they need to look at
/var/log/system.log
because that's where TM tells you exactly what it's doing.
I understand what you are saying, but what I'm saying is a visual indicator, perhaps a menubar item like Sync or maybe a throbbing TM icon in the dock.
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Originally Posted by Gankdawg
I understand what you are saying, but what I'm saying is a visual indicator, perhaps a menubar item like Sync or maybe a throbbing TM icon in the dock.
System Prefs > Time Machine will give you exactly that.
And once we get the 10.5.2 update there will be a menu extra that will you can use as a TM indicator:
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Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -
The icon next to the Time Machine HD in Finder is spinning when Time Machine is doing it's job. Apart from that, why would you want to know? The beauty of Time Machine is that it's so unobtrusive and transparent.
Hi Eric LOL the unobtrusiveness bit. TM is nothing like that here. It works, but causes all kindas slow downs and spinning balls and hangs the usb drive now and then, nothing unexpected from a new product however. But I really don't like the fact that the icon is not animated like all my other apps, one glance to the dashboard and i know what's running and what's not...well, all I care to know. I want to be able to look across the board and see what's running when the little ball starts spinning. BUT HEY, 10.5.2 fixed it with the new menu bar icon YES! gotta love apple. Updates that visually improve things 
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Originally Posted by plamparello
What is the point of having it when it doesn't internally store changes....
 Your harddisk turns dead, but happily you have stored your changes internally!
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Originally Posted by Appleman
Your harddisk turns dead, but happily you have stored your changes internally!
LOL - funny one. I've started to just do backups when I want to, but turning off TM in the system prefs and using the Back Up Now click. Its the way I have always done backups anyway (manually) and I'm fine with that..,wonder if that breaks the TM paradigm.
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Since there's the dock TM icon, it would've been nice to have an option for that icon to change instead of having to add a separate menu bar. Even adding a dot/triangle under TM's dock icon would do it.
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Posting Junkie
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Do you mean you would want the TM menulet to take you straight to Time Machine instead of showing a menu? If so, that would be undesirable from a user interface consistency point of view, since no other menu acts like that.
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Even though I love Leopard (see my "verdict" thread) I have to say that the lack of configure-ability of Time Machine is really, plainly dumb. I won't use the feature until I can, at the very least, have access to a list of included/excluded items. I simply don't want to devote so much space on my backup drive to non-essential files that are easily replaced. I imagine we won't see that feature until 10.6, but Apple did surprise me by fixing Stacks so I guess anything is possible.
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Originally Posted by schalliol
Since there's the dock TM icon, it would've been nice to have an option for that icon to change instead of having to add a separate menu bar. Even adding a dot/triangle under TM's dock icon would do it.
I was surprised by this as well, why didn't apple just make the time machine doc icon behave like all others (blob indicator), but perhaps cause everyone would have to delete the doc icon and add a fresh one to get the effect. The menulet is pretty cool, and makes sense to me.
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Originally Posted by Big Mac
Even though I love Leopard (see my "verdict" thread) I have to say that the lack of configure-ability of Time Machine is really, plainly dumb. I won't use the feature until I can, at the very least, have access to a list of included/excluded items. I simply don't want to devote so much space on my backup drive to non-essential files that are easily replaced.
You can exclude items in the Time Machine system preferences.
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I must have missed that entirely. Thank you very much for the info, Tetenal.
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Apple and Intel: As kosher as a cheeseburger.
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Originally Posted by Big Mac
I must have missed that entirely. Thank you very much for the info, Tetenal.
 hm, strange, as that is the very first thing you do when you back up, plus so many people tried to start with backing up only one file for instance in order to see why Time Machine was freaking out. Anyway, I am happy that you know now ;-)
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Yeah, even though I had heard about exclusions, I was confused because I just saw the option to select a drive and no other settings. Alas, Time Machine seems confused on my G5. It thought my backup drive was my source drive (or perhaps it just says that whenever it finds a drive that isn't completely empty), and then it told me I lacked space for the backup when I know I have enough.
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Apple and Intel: As kosher as a cheeseburger.
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TM still has a way to go imho
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Posting Junkie
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Just like other major new additions to the OS, TM is half baked. FileVault comes to mind as a previous example - I wonder if it has been improved enough to be safe for general use.
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Apple and Intel: As kosher as a cheeseburger.
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Mac Elite
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Originally Posted by Big Mac
Just like other major new additions to the OS, TM is half baked.
I don't think it's half-baked. It's a particular backup implementation, and it has plusses and minuses. It's not a replacement for something like a big Retrospect network install which backs up 100 stations, and it doesn't do bootable clones like SuperDuper. But for its intended purpose--easy and relatively simple home backups--I have no complaints.
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The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.
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It is half-baked. In order for me to consider it fully baked, it should:
- support backups to network volumes, and preferably non-AFP volumes. There is partial support there in creating a sparse disk image on the network volume, this approach should work on SSHfs, Samba, NFS, and other volumes too
- support keeping a backup set within a certain total size for those that don't want t | | | |
