Time Machine: Small troubles and the big picture

Here's some more Time Machine news. If you're seeing any of these phenomena, take heart: you're not alone.

LaCie USB drives We're hearing of cases where an external LaCie drive, although seen by the Finder, is not seen by Time Machine. LaCie is giving the same advice we gave earlier: repartition the drive. But some users are reporting that this isn't helping. In some cases there seems to be a difference between USB and FireWire; for example, Time Machine might not back up to the drive when it is connected via USB, but will do so when the very same drive is connected via FireWire.

Battery power A thread over on Apple's discussion boards suggests that some people are finding Time Machine won't perform an automatic backup from a portable computer if the portable is running on battery power (though it will perform a manual backup when requested to via the Time Machine Dock menu). This could be deliberate; perhaps Time Machine would prefer not to initiate a time-consuming, sleep-preventing activity and risk draining the battery.

Recurring dialog A reader is reporting that every external drive newly hooked up to the computer triggers the Time Machine dialog where it asks whether to use this drive as the backup. It's not hard to see how this annoyance could get old real fast.

In addition, recall our earlier notes about problems with Time Machine remarked upon by Apple themselves, in the Knowledge Base:

• Time Machine may not change the backup destination when requested, unless you log out and log back in.

• Time Machine may not show past backups if your computer's name (from the Sharing preferences) contains characters outside the basic a-z, 0-9 range.

• Time Machine might refuse to back up files past a certain point unless you have repartitioned the backup drive to remove any master boot record. Only Apple Partition Map and GUID partitioning is acceptable.

All of these problems are a great pity, especially since they needn't have occurred in the first place. The main trouble here seems to be haste. There are signs that some of the functionality intended for Time Machine (such as the ability to back up across a network) was removed more or less at the last minute, in order to get Time Machine out the door in time for Leopard to ship by the end of October. In the rush, we may conjecture, Apple failed to provide users with some elementary GUI feedback that would have taken care of many issues we're now seeing. For example, it's very strange that Time Machine can't make a backup if it doesn't like your computer's name, but this wouldn't really be a problem, if Time Machine would just put up a dialog, saying, "Sorry, I can't make a backup, I'm having trouble with your computer's name; would you mind changing it?" Instead, Time Machine just fails silently. That's the real problem, as things stand.

In a recent article in Computerworld, a LaCie representative takes Time Machine to task for the master boot record problem and the computer name problem: Apple seems to have failed to test sufficiently, he says, and is only now discovering these things, after the release of Leopard. Perhaps, but these are relatively minor issues; there are simple workarounds, and Apple has told us what they are. Making a big deal of this in public might be a sleight-of-hand on LaCie's part. People who are having trouble with LaCie drives not being seen by Time Machine are saying that they have okay computer names and that they have repartitioned the drive; so in these cases, something else is apparently going on, and it might be going on at LaCie's end of the equation. It would presumably be in LaCie's interest to keep the attention focused on Apple's end.

Time Machine may be very simple, perhaps too simple, in its interface and in its abilities; but the fact remains that for most people, with one computer and one external drive hooked up to it, it's working great. Think how many times you've deleted something and later wished you hadn't. Think how many times you've installed a system update and wished you hadn't! Think how many times you've been scolded, or have scolded yourself, for not having a backup of something. Time Machine offers a simple solution. Already we've had reports of people installing something, discovering ill effects, and going "back in time" to restore the computer to an earlier state. That's what Time Machine is all about! Time Machine stands to eliminate, all by itself, a large percentage of the woes with which readers have filled MacFixIt's pages in the past.

So, we continue to recommend that you use Time Machine, and use it with confidence. This is one of the major features of Leopard, and not to take advantage of it is to miss out on something valuable and important. Your habits don't have to change; any time your computer and your backup drive are both switched on and connected, Time Machine will chug away automatically. The one habit that does need to change is that before performing any major installation, you should make sure you've got a backup of the computer's most recent state, so you can easily restore if there's a problem. To make a manual backup, choose Back Up Now from Time Machine's Dock icon. You can monitor the backup's progress in Time Machine's system preference pane. When the backup is complete, you're ready to install confidently, knowing you can reverse the process easily.

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