So I have been playing with Time Machine today to check it out and I have noticed a few things. First, there is no obvious indicator when it is creating a backup.
If you go to the finder and look, the time machine drive will display a spinning logo beside it, or if you right click on the Time Machine icon it will say “Stop Backing Up” instead of “Back Up Now,” but I have noticed this one particular thing three times now.
Invoking Time Machine while it’s backing up locks up my laptop every time!
In these instances I can’t do anything. I have found that unplugging the external drive will bring it back, but that’s a pretty hokey solution. Has anyone else noticed this? Anyone else tested Time Machine much?
I love the feature, I went out and bought a portable external for my Macbook Pro singularly for this purpose. But I wanna be able to click Time Machine and find the file, not have to stop and look around to see if it’s running first. Why not a warning, “Time Machine is backing up your computer, please stop the backup before continuing” or something?
[UPDATE]
I disabled Time Machine. Since setting it up my system had become quite unstable. It locked up regularly, it wouldn’t shut down several times. The machine just acted really funny. I disabled it and it’s back to normal.
Time Machine was the one of the features that I was most anticipating in this release. In fact, it was my number one most anticipated. I am actually quite disappointed. I was hoping it would be really easy. It seemed that way when I first booted up and immediately Mac asked if it wanted to use my WD My Book drive for the backup.
So, I went ahead and set it up. Since then, I have been having many issues. I wanted my MacBook to connect to this drive as well over the network. I connected it to my desktop (via our wireless network) and it recognized it. So I started backing up. The issue I have with it, is that it is really sluggish. And, I am having issues even getting my desktop to back up to the drive. It just keeps crashing.
i have time machine running on my MBP using a OWC mercury elite pro external HD (with a 7200rpm 320 GB SATA drive) over FW800. time machine works fine for me.
the initial backup took a while and during that time my machine was pretty sluggish. i.e imagine copying 90+GB of data onto and external HD …
i would imagine that if you’re using a slower interface and/or drive. doing this over a wireless network would be even worse. the initial backup alone would take days!
Did you check the Console utility to look for any error messages Time Machine or the OS might be coughing up? (Console is greatly improved in Leopard, by the way.)
If disk I/O is literally locking up your system, my first guess would be that you’re getting hardware errors from one of the drives, either the one you’re reading from or the one you’re writing to. If you see something like:
10/29/07 1:23:37 PM kernel disk1s2: I/O error.
in Console, then you should contact either AppleCare or the company that made your external drive for a replacement.
Time Machine isn’t inherently unstable, ’cause it’s working like an absolute charm for me. So far it’s completely flawless.
(Oh, by the way, the backup progress indicator is in the Time Machine pane of System Preferences. It tells you there when you were last backed up, when you’ll next be backed up, and if a backup is in progress at the time, a progress bar shows you how it’s going.)
I’ve been having the same issues with Time Machine. The first time it happened I couldn’t stop TM from continuing. I couldn’t force-quit it, I couldn’t shutdown, reboot, close anything. the only thing that worked was moving my mouse around. If I clicked on any apps in the dock they would bounce for a couple minutes… and then… nothing… I finally had to hold the pwr button down.
This was also one of my more anticipated (not cut) features and it works good when it works. I seem to see this issue happen mainly when I have Parallels up. There are some known bugs with Parallels and Leopard right now though too.
I’ve been ejecting the drive in the middle of TM if it freezes but yes I agree that’s a not so good solution.
Hopefully we see an update soon
Time machine suck big time.
It’s sluggish and completely locks the machine if you happen to have any VM running (Parallels or Fusion).
Not to mention that the back-ups are not compressed and shortly you end up browsing 2 000 000 files on an external drive. Major disappointment for me.
Perhaps we can alleviate the problems by excluding VM folders from backing up.
It would be cool if Time Machine backed up based on the method that SVN (Subversion) writes files. It writes a baseline and only changes after that.
lots of people not understanding what they’re writing about, at least in the last two comments.
time machine works exactly like this - it doesn’t create a new file unless it has changed.
the user doesn’t notice this thanks to a feature on the file system level called “hard links”. google will tell you more, if you’re interested.
I am using a Mac Mini PPC 1.42Ghz with 1GB RAM. Time Machine has been locking up on me since the 10.5.2 update.
I got the new Time Machine update and it does not seem to have fixed whatever is wrong.
I currently have already done the following tests:
Moved the 500GB drive to another enclosure using USB2 instead of Firewire. RESULT: no change. Time Machine locked up the system during the process of backing up again.
This drive was working perfectly before the 10.5.2 update.
Now any time I enable Time Machine it messes up the Time Machine partition to the point where it won’t repair or even verify. It fails within 24 hrs of turning Time Machine on.
I am going to take the drive into Linux and do a read/write verification on the entire drive to see if it now has sector problems.
I have a bad feeling about this.