[markw10]

I just placed my preorder today for a family pack of Leopard. One thing I'm looking forward to is Time Machine.
I have two macbook pros for me and my fiancee, a Mac Mini, and sometime soon an iMac I don't store sensitive data on the Mac Mini or iMac so backups aren't a big concern to me.
My main concern is the two Macbook Pro's which we both depend on for work. I have a external firewire drive that I back up to approximately once a week and store in a fireproof save. I use SuperDuper so create a complete bootable mirror of them.
I also have an Airport Extreme Base Station with a Western Digital 500GB hard drive. I store some items on that such as 70GB directory of clip art and also other important temp files and files that we use among the 4 computers. We have around 300GB free. We also use Chronosync which nightly backs up important directories such as Safari Bookmarks, accounting data, documents, mail data files, etc.
Now with Time Machine I'm not sure how to change my plans. I plan to do the two backups which are stored in the safe but will Time Machine work with my Base Station Hard Drive? Both MacBook Pro's have around 100GB of data on them and I'm confused if it would need 100GB to back up or less or more.
Am I better off getting a firewire drive that has to start on each MacBook Pro for it to work or will it work with a networked drive?
If networked am I better off getting a 2nd dedicated base station drive or is a pure ethernet hard drive faster in speed?

[Simon]

From what I understand TM will not work with your AirDisk. Your external HDDs will work fine though.

TM will need at least as much free disk space as your source volume has data on it.

I'm using asr to make bootable clones of my personal Mac to an external disk on a weekly basis. That is my primary backup (work related stuff gets backed up daily to a server here at work). I would have liked to use TM instead, but until there is an easy way to make TM backups bootable, I'll just stick with asr. In principle it's not less convenient to use asr. The only difference is that TM will do the backup automatically once the external drive is connected, whereas I have to run the asr command manually. Of course asr takes a lot more time for it's full backup, than TM's incremental/differential scheme, but since I backup while I sleep I don't care if it takes 5 minutes or 5 hours.

Ay ideas if it will be possible to make a couple of symlinks on the TM partition in order to make it bootable?

[analogika]

Time Machine WILL work with AirDisk - at least, according to the AppleInsider article on it, it works just fine on network drives.

[TETENAL]

Since you are talking about Mac Pros here you could also just stick another drive (I would probably say about 50% larger than the working drive) into each of them.

If you have 100 GB drive space used on a computer the first backup will take 100 GB going upwards as time progresses.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by analogika 

Time Machine WILL work with AirDisk - at least, according to the AppleInsider article on it, it works just fine on network drives.

Yeah, you're right. AI explicitly says (last section) it should also work with AirDisk. That would be very good news. Let's hope they're right.

[bearcatrp]

Just watched the tour of leopard. One question I have on time machine is how far back does it go (ie. 1 month, 1 year, etc)? Is it user selectable? So if I want to keep backups for say 2 years on a 250gb hard drive, how big should be the backup drive?
tnks
Randy

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by analogika 

Time Machine WILL work with AirDisk - at least, according to the AppleInsider article on it, it works just fine on network drives.

Also according to Apple.

[Krusty]

Originally Posted by bearcatrp 

Just watched the tour of leopard. One question I have on time machine is how far back does it go (ie. 1 month, 1 year, etc)? Is it user selectable? So if I want to keep backups for say 2 years on a 250gb hard drive, how big should be the backup drive?
tnks
Randy

From Apple's TM site:

Backing up to a full disk.
One day, no matter how large your backup drive is, it will run out of space. And Time Machine has an action plan. It alerts you that it will start deleting previous backups, oldest first. Before it deletes any backup, Time Machine copies files that might be needed to fully restore your disk for every remaining backup. (Moral of the story: The larger the drive, the farther back in time you can back up.)

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Also according to Apple.

Hmm,
Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.

Does AirDisk use AFP? I thought it used SMB (but maybe that was just under Windows). I guess if AirDisk uses AFP then "Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing" pretty much confirms it.

[Chuckit]

I'm relatively sure it uses both AFP and SMP sharing so everybody can use the protocol that works best for them. I admit I didn't check first, but a quick Google seems to agree with my recollection.

[cybergoober]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

Since you are talking about Mac Pros here you could also just stick another drive (I would probably say about 50% larger than the working drive) into each of them.

If you have 100 GB drive space used on a computer the first backup will take 100 GB going upwards as time progresses.

OP said MacBook Pros…

[HowEver]

How deathly slow will Time Machine backups to AirDisk connected drives be?

[Chuckit]

Probably not all that slow after the first one, if I were to guess.

[bxs]

Originally Posted by HowEver 

How deathly slow will Time Machine backups to AirDisk connected drives be?

The AirDisk USB2 HD will allow backup data rates around 4 MB/s to 7 MB/s. Not very fast as things go these days, but fast enough if say you allow the first TM backup of your boot Volume to be started just before bedtime.

If you have some 100 GB of data on your boot Volume (the TM backup default) the at 7 MB/s (some 25 GB/hr) you would expect the first TM backup to take around 4 to 5 hrs.

Subsequent hourly TM backups/snapshots will typically be very much smaller and likely to be around a few hundred MBs. These snapshots will be quite quick.

Thus the AirDisk is realy quite suitable especially if there are several Mac wanting to backup to it. Each one will get their share of space and will not collide wrt TM access. In fact, this is one of the AirDisk benefits.

[wr11]

"Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing"

That doesn't confirm anything. A Mac running personal file sharing is different from a general AFP network connection - like a NAS or perhaps even an AirDisk. I am not sure what they could do but their site does go out of it's way to mention HFS+ formatted drive which for many NAS drives is just not an option.

[Simon]

AirDisk uses AFP for Macs and SMB for Windows. In that sense AirDisk is not just any NAS.

[wr11]

Originally Posted by Simon 

AirDisk uses AFP for Macs and SMB for Windows. In that sense AirDisk is not just any NAS.

All it's doing is sharing with both services at the same time. 1 AFP service and 1 SMB service and depending on the NAS you could easily have those plus many more services serving up one share.

I'm getting a NAS (Synology's 107+ Disk Station) tomorrow. It can share using AFP, SMB and FTP but the drive itself is formatted with EXT3. From what Wikipedia has to say EXT3 supports multi-forked files and most of the HFS+ mojo. When all is said and done I am hoping that Apple will support Time Machine on any AFP shared drive.

All this to upgrade to leopard, I need to be able to back up my system before I upgrade. I guess I could have just put another drive in my system... but where's the fun in that

[Buck_W]

Does anybody have an opinion on this particular HD that is recommended on Apple's website:

The Apple Store (U.S.) - Iomega 500GB Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Desktop Hard Drive

That appears to be a pretty good deal (if the hardware is reliable).