Leopard’s Time Machine - Hmmm…

In my previous article about recovering from a Disk Crash on my Macbook, I talked about the joys and merits of ‘Time Machine’ - the new backup feature in OSX Leopard. A little further on, I find its not quite as full-featured as I’d hoped…well, not yet anyway.

Time Machine is essentially meant to be an automated backup application for everyone - set it up, and then just let it do its stuff. However, it’s currently not quite that straight forward.

Firstly, it currently only backs up to an additional HFS+ formatted hard drive other than your boot disk - either internal, Firewire/USB, another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t attach additional drives to my laptop by default - it has to be intentional and normally for a specific purpose. Also, the only Network Drives I have access to are SMB (Windows Shares). So that fact that Time Machine only works this way is quite a very limitation for me at this stage.

Of course, you can try the “un-supported” approach. If you run the following command from Terminal, unsupported Network Drives will appear in Time Machine:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Caveat emptor…

Secondly, restoring from a Time Machine backup is also somewhat limited currently. While Time Machine does do a point-in-time backup on an hourly basis (when connected to a defined backup device), from which you can restore individual files or folders, it does not automatically allow you to roll your whole disk forward or backward to that point-in-time.

For example, after my Macbook’s hard drive had been replaced, I re-cloned my external USB drive (a 2-day-old copy from the loan machine I was using) to the new internal drive using Carbon Copy Cloner - perfect. Worked a treat. But, when I then attached the Time Machine Backup drive and ran Time Machine, all I could do was manually restore individual files and folders from my more recent Time Machine backup. Clearly, all the data was there - I could see it! And so while I managed to get what I needed, but there was no easy way to roll my whole disk forward to that point-in-time snapshot.

It seems the only officially sanctioned way of restoring your whole drive is to boot from the Leopard DVD, and then ‘Restore from a Time Machine Backup’. One of the warnings that comes up says that this process will erase all data on the target drive - so it appears Time Machine is not quite smart enough to simply restore the more recent data.

Perhaps I am asking too much of a consumer OS? Would be a really nice feature to have though wouldn’t it… Automatic roll forward and back. Maybe in a future release.