Hardware :: Time Machine Versus Prosoft Data Backup
Jan 8, 2011
I recently purchased a Mercury Elite-AL Pro from OWC and it included Prosoft Engineering Data Backup. Are there advantages in using Time Machine vs. Prosoft Engineering Data Backup or vice versa? Also, what about something different like Carbon Copy Cloner? I'm looking to do this right the first time.
I recently bought an intel x25 160gb for my uMPB. I have a time capsule backing up my system so I just swapped in the new SSD and hit "restore from time machine backup".
About an hour later, the install was finished and everything looked exactly how I left it.
I can't understate how impressive that feature is by the way. However, I wonder if it might be better to do a clean install to really get best performance here.
I say that because I also installed a clean copy of win7 via bootcamp and it actually seems faster than OSX. For example, every common app; firefox, chrome, microsoft office, etc. launches faster in win7 than it does in OSX.
My OSX installation is about 18 months old without any clean installs, and I'm wondering if anyone here has noticed significantly better system performance with a clean install rather than a time machine backup.
After a catastrophic HD crash I bought a small 250GB external hard-drive an started to use Time machine. Since my Mac was freshly formatted, I tend to keep it tidy and clean and keep good track of what comes in. I noticed my time machine backing up 15 GB of data which allegedly would have been added within two days. I could absolutely not trace this on my computer nor when I compared current folder contents with the most recent backup. Downloads, Apps., System are all excluded from my time-machine and couldn't represent such a dramatic data increase on my separate HD.
I'm doing an initial backup to a Time Capsule and I want to make sure all my data was copied successfully. Does Time Machine verify that the data was copied successfully or does it just send it and hope everything copied alright? I know this is the kind of question only the Apple developers would know for certain, but hey, sometimes folks on these forums are surprisingly knowledgeable so I figured I'd ask here.
I'm getting a new macbook. Currently I use time machine as a backup tool and was wondering if I should use it to transfer all my data to the new mac. One benefit of a new harddrive is the fresh install without all the junk that has built up over the years right? So wouldn't time machine just be transferring all the junk and stuff I want to the new mac? or is time machine smarter than this.
So I just successfully migrated all of my data and settings from my old iMac to my new 27 inch iMac using the Time machine backup on my Western Digital 1 TB external hard drive. Aside from the Time machine backup folder I also dragged a few other things over to the external hard drive because there was so much extra space on it. The drive is not partitioned.
So I'd like to start using Time machine with this new 27 inch iMac but the empty space that's left on the external hard drive is barely large enough to cover what I now have on the internal hard drive on my new 27 inch iMac. If I were to remove the Time machine backup from my old iMac there would be plenty of space again unless starting Time Machine on this new 27 inch iMac will just copy right over that backup file? Everything on this new iMac, the data and settings and so forth, is exactly the same. So is the user account. However the previous Mac was running Leopard while this new iMac is running Snow Leopard.
So if it doesn't copy over the old backup it will just create a new backup file? And if it does create a new backup file is there any point to keeping the old backup file since I no longer have the old iMac and wouldn't be able to access it again? Obviously if I didn't have to keep it I could erase it which would create plenty of extra space for me to start using Time machine again but with this new iMac.
We are a PC to Mac convert and still trying to understand some basics. We have an iMac 21.5 and expecting delivery of a external 1.5 TD drive. More than we'll even need, but dirt cheap. We also run Windows 7 64 bit through VMware Fusion. The only reason for that is the Windows version of Quicken is a better product the the Mac version.
We will back up pics, Videos, etc., on the iMac under MacOs with Time Machine. Can Time Machine also backup the quicken data files from the Windows 7 VM machine? I hoping we do not need to maintain separate backup drives to manage the different type of file formats between Windows and Mac. I hoping this can be managed through one place...Time Machine.
I've spent a good deal of time over three days trying to do something that I think is both doable and shouldn't be all that hard. I have a 750gb external HD attached to a Mini, and I'd like to use that drive to do TM backups for the Mini, as well as three MacBooks.
But I can't seem to get access to the backup drive from the laptops to either get going in the first place, or to remain available for TM. I get "volume can't be mounted" errors, "image can't be mounted errors", etc. I find that I can't ever eject the backup drive from the Mini (always told an application is using it...even if I've just booted up the Mini). And with one of the MacBooks, even a direct FW connection to the drive doesn't result in the drive showing up in Finder.
Isn't this a pretty straightforward thing to do? Is there a step by step somewhere that might help me figure out what I'm doing wrong, or what I need to fix? Should I reformat the drive again and start over (there are no important backups on it yet)? By the way, the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
I have a linksys wrt610n wireless router that isn't set up yet. You can attach USB drives to the router to use as a nas. I can't find if time machine will use it or let me use a drive attached to the router for my backups.
I connected my windows removable disk to my colleague's mac to transfer some data. Accidentally her system started a time machine backup on my removable disk. Although we stopped it during middle of the process, now my disk is no longer recognizable in windows and all I can see under a mac system is her backup file.
The process took a very short time. I wonder if it has deleted everything. Is there any chance I can get the overwritten data back? They are very important to me.
Besides, is it a common problem of time machine backup? It is too dangerous for the removable disks.
if i am running my new lion OS on drive #1 and i have a Raid1 array on drive #3 and #4 with all my DATA - can i back this up using Time Machine? i would like to place my OS's on a single drive and have my DATA in a raid array but if this means that i lose the ability to retain a Time Machine backup of my data i will simply upgrade to Lion and keep the data on this drive so it can continue to get backed up in time.
Can I use time machine to back up my data without formatting the external hard drive .. If not please let me know if there is a way to back up to hard drive without using time machine.. Thank you
How long would it take to backup 900GB of data doing a full back-up using TimeMachine and my MacBook? My MacBook being a 2009 model with 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.
I have: 1 x MacBook 160GB drive 1 x Imoega minimax 500GB drive (firewire or USB 2 connection possible) 1 x Seagate 320GB drive (USB 2 only connection)
I have a 400 firewire port in my MacBook in addition to 2 USB sockets, as well as fireWire hub with power supply, should I wish to run 2 or more firewire devices at once, into the 400 firewire port.
My current backup drive is a Samsung USB2 1TB drive but for reasons that will hopefully become obvious below, I will need to purchase a new drive. I think a 1.5TB or 2TB would be fine and I guess a 400 firewire port is still better than USB2, even though it's only 400. However I'm not sure about the time issue.................
I just got a new 256GB SSD drive for my mac, I want to import my data from time machine backup, but its larger than 256GB since it used to be on my old optical drive. How can I import my latest backup keeping out some big files on the external drive?
Once I turn on the guest network in the Airport Utility, the network is unavailable and I can't connect to the Time Machine with the Airport Utility. I have to reset the device and keep it disabled. As long as the guest network is disabled, everything works fine. The Time Machine is fully updated and working fine otherwise. Any ideas?
Basically I have a 750GB hard drive in my Macbook Pro and over 300GB is taken up with 'BackUp' data. This is more than the total of everything I have on the drive other than that. Time Machine has always been setup on an external drive and when searching all files on the Macbook there is nothing for backup files so don't know where it is coming from.
I have looked into this a lot already. It is to much that Time Machine backs up every single hour! It would be nice to set it to something like 3 or 5 hours. I have tried a 3rd party app to do this, but... If my computer was off or asleep when it was supposed to back up, it would get an error. It would not just do the backup when i turned it on or when it came out of sleep like stock Time Machine does. I have also seen a way to change the time incraments in the Terminal.(I am very good with it, not a noob) I have tried this and it screws up time machine completely. Maybe it does not work with the newest OS X. By the way... I have a 2010 MacBook Pro, got it 2 months ago.
Does anyone know a solid 3rd party app, that will work seamlessly. Or has anyone changed the time in Terminal and are currently using something different than 1 hour. There is a lot of examples online, but I would like the codeing that you literally used.
I am getting the following error from Time Machine when doing my first backup. The startup disk being backed up, and the TM disk are both the same size.
Macintosh HD: 465.44 (total); 393.99 (free); 71.45 (free) Time Machine: 465.44 (total); 465.29 (free)
The Time Machine error is: Quote:
"This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 472.7 GB but only 465.3 GB are available." why would this be? Other disks are excluded from the backup, and Time Machine is telling me that it needs more space than it actually needs. What should I do?
I was a PC user who recently moved to mac. I have a macbook (intel 2.2GHz, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD). When I was using PC, I backed up all my data to a network storage device (Buffalo LinkStation 250 GB connected to a 802.11g netgear router which is supplied by Sky) using a program called SmartSync Pro, which worked very well. Although I can connect to and mount the Share folder on this drive when the macbook is connected to the network, Time Machine will not back up to it. It wouldnt even recognise the disk on the network.
So I went onto the trusty internet, and found that you can get time machine to recognise the Share folder. (This was obtained from: http://blog.imulus.com/george/software/using-leopard-time-machine-to-backup-of-a-network/)See my comment on their page at the bottom, number 66.
It recommended entering the following in to the Terminal: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Before attempting backup I have to go into "Network" and select the Share folder by double clicking on it. This seems to mount the volume. After this, it can be seen in Time Machine as a potential backup destination.
However, this method does not work for me. Time Machine "prepares" for a while, then gives the following message: Time Machine error. The backup disk image could not be created.
More internet searching took me to macosxhints which suggests creating something called a sparsebundle image on my local system. (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080420211034137) Have not tried this yet as I thought it would be prudent to seek some help first.
Apple have deliberately disabled the ability for Time Machine to back up to network attached storage, (except of course to their proprietory Time Capsule):
Is this because time machine requires a network faster than 802.11g?
Is this because a time machine backup to a network attached storage device is unreliable and the data is corrupted?
I dont want to shell out more cash for a time capsule. I would prefer not to have to hardwire to an external drive (which I will also have to go out and buy). Any thoughts?
I just purchased a Seagate 3 TB USB 2.0/3.0 external drive to use as my time machine backup drive. I have a MacBook Pro that was purchased about 3-4 years ago. The MacBook Pro has a 120 GB hard drive and is currently running MAC OSx 10.6.8. I also have another WD 1 TB FireWire external drive that I use to store all of my media files.
After I followed the instructions for installing the new Seagate drive for use with the MAC OSx, I initiated a time machine backup. It very quickly determined that it needed to back up almost 900,000 files totaling just about 400 GB. It started the backup process at a rate of about 1 GB per minute. In a little less than an hour it reach 53 GB and remained there for an additional two hours before I decided to stop the backup.
Once I got the backup stopped, I deleted the backup and decided to look at my energy saving settings. I noticed that the "Put drives to sleep whenever possible" check box was checked, so I unchecked that option and restarted the MAC. I then initiated the time machine backup again. Like the first time it quickly determined that it needed to backup the same amount of data as before and started the backup process at a rate of about 1 GB per minute. Before going to bed at around 11 PM last night it was at about 60 GB so I thought I was out of the woods (having gotten further than the 53 GB earlier). When I woke up this morning at 5:30 AM it was sitting at 69 GB.
I am really frustrated at this point and don't know why the time machine back up would be failing on a brand new hard drive. PS - I was previously using a Seagate 1.5 TB USB drive as my time machine backup and never had any issues with it. I decided to use the 1.5 TB drive for a different purpose, which is why I have the new 3 TB drive to use as a backup. And I still have the full backup on the 1.5 TB drive just in case anything were to go awry.
I have a external HD which has always worked fine under snow leopard. Since upgrading to lion I keep getting the following message The identity of the backup disk has changed since the previous backup.The disk may have been replaced or erased, or someone may be trying to trick your computer into backing up to the wrong disk. And after this the drive disappears from the desktop appearing agian only after restart. What can I do do rectify this? Delete and re-intialise the drive?
Just wanted to check if he problem was unique to my MBA (Rev B, HDD) or you notice it too ;
My Time Machine backup takes up to 6 hours to do a backup of about 30GB. And each backup size is 31.5GB everytime !!
I have the following Config - 80 GB for OSX (53GB Free) and 40 GB (10GB Free) for Win 7 on Bootcamp. Sometimes I wonder if TM making a backup of Win 7 also everytime. (Does it mean - In a way its good, that means I should be able to restore the entire hard disk from TM including Applications, Win 7 , bootcamp and all the programmes installed in Win 7 in case I have a problem ?)
But the speed should still be fast... 6 hours to do a 32GB backup is torturous specially because then I have to leave the machine alone and cannot use it.
Is there a way to make a backup of your Time Machine backup on a 2nd hard drive? I want to be doubly sure that my data is backed up!Right now I get an error saying that the second hard drive isn't authorized to copy my Time Machine data from the original hard drive I have set up as my Time Machine.
I just replaced my HD on my 15"MBP. The install went well until restoring my data from Time Machine. The apps came over fine but none of my data did. Yes, I checked all the boxes on the "restore from backup" menu.
Of course now when I start up time machine the backup isn't there. How do I get Time Machine to recognize the backup? I have it on two places - a time capsule and a separate external HD.
I just replaced the stock 160GB HD in my unibody macbook with a WD Blue Scorpio 640GB HD. I used Super Duper to clone the old drive to the new one, approximately 115 GB.
Now Time Machine wants to backup the full 115GB to my Time Capsule, which kinda sucks because it's going to be a redundent backup that's gonna take up over a 10th of my TC's space. Is there any way to avoid this and still use Time Machine?
I have a 1tb external for time machine back up and have about 750 gb of stuff to back up. I was under the impression that when time machine backs up my stuff it will automatically delete the oldest backup to create room for the newer backup.
My problem is that i did a back up a couple weeks ago and then today i go to back up and it tells me back up failed only 718gb available for 740gb of stuff to back up
Well TM is acting up. I get an error that reads: "This backup is too large for the backup volume."
Both the internal boot disk and the external baclup drive are 1TB. The internal one has a two partitions, the OSX one that is 900GBs and a 32GB NTFS one for Boot Camp. The external drive is a single OSX Extended part. that is 932GBs.
Both the Time Machine disk, and the Boot Camp disk are excluded from the backup along with a "Crap" folder for temporary large files.
Time Machine says it needs 938GBs to backup only the OSX disk, which has 806GBs in use with the rest free. WTFFF?
This happened after moving a large folder (128GB in total) from the root of the OSX disk over to my Home Folder.
I have reformated the Time Machine drive and have no backups at all of my data and it refuses to backup!!
Why would it need 938GBs of space to backup if the disk has "only" 806 GBs in use??? Is there anyway to reset Time Machine completely???