Time Machine - again

[Risorgimento]

You are making fun and ridiculing the onlie begetter of this Forum, I hope I realise

Dave, I use SuperDuper! for the Smart Updates on two separate external HDs - I have never had to do more than check the updates are there. Everything I value is on the computer HD, so in the event of a crash it will still be on the two externals - the LaCie is about half full after six years. I don't have music, videos or photos anyway. If it all went up in smoke I'd probably be quite relieved and go off to live on the Costa Brava .

FF..suggest you periodically boot up your Mac from your SuperDuper copy. This will give you reassurance that you can (in the event of a hard disk failure in the Mac) be able to run things virtually immediately.

With regard to older TM backups....how realistic is it going to be if, say, in two years time you need a document about something or other but you might not remember it's exact name nor the date when it might have been on your system. How much time will you spend hunting for it? If you are concerned about deletions then get an external hard drive and an enclosure (that's the cheapest way) and use that as your TM backup. Then when that is full, replace with a newer one.

Be advised though that the power supplies in early Time Capsules have a bad reputation for going duff. Especially as the basic design of the Time Capsule is flawed and allows it to overheat something rotten. There are mods around to stop this happening.

[french frank]

FF..suggest you periodically boot up your Mac from your SuperDuper copy. This will give you reassurance that you can (in the event of a hard disk failure in the Mac) be able to run things virtually immediately.

I confess I'm not too sure how to do that - do you hold something down while you're booting up? (yes, I would do a back-up immediately before trying it )

I'm not really that serious a technician. If the HD went on the iMac, I'd go down the road to my secondhand Mac specialist, Dan, flog it to him for parts, buy a (newer secondhand one from him) and hand over the external HD for him to load on the 'new' machine. Not everyone's solution ...

...if, say, in two years time you need a document about something or other but you might not remember it's exact name nor the date when it might have been on your system. How much time will you spend hunting for it?

Are you mad? Does anyone remember what they had on their system two years ago?

[Risorgimento]

Here you go...

Use these steps to choose a startup disk with Startup Manager:

Turn on or restart your Mac.
Immediately press and hold the Option key. After a few seconds, the Startup Manager appears. If you don't see the volume you want to use, wait a few moments for Startup Manager to finish scanning connected drives.
Use your mouse or trackpad, or left and right arrow keys to select the volume you want to use.
Double-click or press the Return key to start up your Mac from the volume you selected.

HTH

[MrGongGong]

Are you mad? Does anyone remember what they had on their system two years ago?

Of course, one of the potential "issues" with Mavericks is that it will repeatedly ask you for your "local keychain password" which is the one that was first typed in when the computer was started for the first time

(If you do get this problem I now know how to "fix" it without the aid of a lump hammer, time travel or truth drug !)

One of my Christmas tasks is to go back to snow leopard with a completely clean install.

[french frank]

Here you go...

Use these steps to choose a startup disk with Startup Manager:

Turn on or restart your Mac.
Immediately press and hold the Option key. After a few seconds, the Startup Manager appears. If you don't see the volume you want to use, wait a few moments for Startup Manager to finish scanning connected drives.
Use your mouse or trackpad, or left and right arrow keys to select the volume you want to use.
Double-click or press the Return key to start up your Mac from the volume you selected.

HTH

Thanks, R - a little job for Christmas Day

[french frank]

One of my Christmas tasks is to go back to snow leopard with a completely clean install.

I've found Mavericks pretty trouble-free. And it's solved the problem of one Snow Leopard glitch - with SL the Time Machine HD failed to mount when I booted up. I always had to switch it off first and then switch it on again. Not necessary with Mavericks. No problem with passwords either.

[MrGongGong]

I've found Mavericks pretty trouble-free. .

I've had the opposite experience
Crashing
Having to reinstall software
and found that many others have the same problems

Yosemite is a no-go as it simply doesn't work with some of the software I use all the time.

Hopeless and unreliable and reminds me of the old windows drivers nonsense that I thought I had left behind

Hopefully a totally clean install will solve these issues (I might try Mavericks as a clean install before going back to SL)

[french frank]

Here you go...

Use these steps to choose a startup disk with Startup Manager:

Turn on or restart your Mac.
Immediately press and hold the Option key. After a few seconds, the Startup Manager appears. If you don't see the volume you want to use, wait a few moments for Startup Manager to finish scanning connected drives.
Use your mouse or trackpad, or left and right arrow keys to select the volume you want to use.
Double-click or press the Return key to start up your Mac from the volume you selected.

HTH

Just operating it with the tiny WD Passport drive - I've yet to try the LaCie. Slowish and plenty of Spinning Wheels of Death, but, yes, it booted up.

One crass question once it's booted up, is the machine operating entirely off the little HD? Seemingly no way to eject it so I assume everything would crash if you did/could?

[Risorgimento]

Just operating it with the tiny WD Passport drive - I've yet to try the LaCie. Slowish and plenty of Spinning Wheels of Death, but, yes, it booted up.

One crass question once it's booted up, is the machine operating entirely off the little HD? Seemingly no way to eject it so I assume everything would crash if you did/could?

Excellent.

There's no such thing as a crass question. The answer is 'Yes'...you are running everything from that drive. So if, for example, your main drive inside the Mac packed up, you can at least keep running. But without any newer backups taking place as your backup becomes your 'main' drive. So in that scenario you'd want to get your Mac repaired ASAP and then booting up from your external drive, copy back everything to your new drive inside your Mac. It will, naturally, take you back to the stage you were at the time of the last backup prior to your crash. Hope this makes sense.

Or if Santa had been kind to you, you'd go out and buy a spanking new Mac and copy back your backup to that.

As it happens, the power supply in our Time Capsule went duff recently and I ordered a secondhand one from HK which arrived promptly and does the trick. Meanwhile our Macs were backing up (as they normally do) using SuperDuper to external hard drives. The reason for the Time Capsule is that it normally is physically located a small distance from the house. So if the house were to burn down etc then we have a remote copy available of all out stuff.

Footnote...if anyone has an old Time Capsule and it runs out of space and you are tempted to remove the old hard drive and slip in a newer higher capacity one then the chances are that it won't work because the old power supply does not have enough capacity to feed newer drives that have a quicker seek capability. The current surge is too great. The solution is either to replace the power supply with a beefier one or, as we did, buy a separate drive and stick it in a separate enclosure. Then plug it into the back of the Time Capsule using a USB cable. A bit slow but it works.

[french frank]

There's no such thing as a crass question. The answer is 'Yes'...you are running everything from that drive. So if, for example, your main drive inside the Mac packed up, you can at least keep running. But without any newer backups taking place as your backup becomes your 'main' drive. So in that scenario you'd want to get your Mac repaired ASAP and then booting up from your external drive, copy back everything to your new drive inside your Mac. It will, naturally, take you back to the stage you were at the time of the last backup prior to your crash. Hope this makes sense.

Thanks - thought that must be the case - that the assumption was that the computer drive had packed up, so no option to eject junior in the usual way.

As for the Footnote: excuse me while I return to my Quantum Mechanics Made Easy :-)

[Dave2002]

I just found this article which hints (almost) that Time Machine is more or less a write only system. It's easy to install, gives the impression, maybe, that it's working, but when it comes to the crunch it may not be easy to recover files etc. - http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/artic...ils-user-needs

There are things which it does do - seemingly OK. Some things seem to be application specific.

For example do the following:

1. Open Mail
Then open TM

This enables mail from previous dates, including deleted mail, to be viewed again. I'm not sure if it's possible to export single items of mail viewed in this way.

2. Open Contacts
Then open TM.
This should (sample of not too many tries suggests it works sometimes) enable the state of the address book on certain days to be checked. Again, not sure if it's possible to revert to a previous state - perhaps export then re-import would work.

However,
3. Open iTunes
Then Time Machine ...
Nothing special seems to happen.

4. It is possible to check for previous files on the desktop and in folders, but it is not actually so obvious how to recover:

a. a single file
b. a single folder
and hence multiple files or folders.

There are instructions available for a complete recovery of the file system, but that's not always what's wanted. As the article cited here mentions, most people who expect to have to do this kind of thing might go straight for a backup solution, such as Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper, and save the expense and bother of trying to make Time Machine work for them.

I took various backups, includint a TM "backup" of one of my machines when I migrated it from Snow Leopard to El Capitan - following the recommended instructions - but since I've not had a need (so far) to revert that one back, it has arguably been a waste of money for the disc drive I bought as a precaution.

[Anastasius]

I had reason recently to be grateful to my Time Machine backups. I have one email account that is IMAP and, as far as I can see, Apple Mail is simply a window into the mail (both In and Out) that is sitting on the server. This differs from a POP3 account which keeps the emails local on your Mac (and the type of email account that I have been using for nigh on 20 years).

So I had a senior moment while checking my website that hosts that IMAP email account and decided to have a clear down and delete a load of sent emails and also incoming emails ...well, they're on my iMac, aren't they .....nope, they are not. I didn't realise this until the next day by which time my two overnight backups had done their stuff and brought the backup copies into line with my iMac...ie sans IMAP emails.

Then I had a flash of inspiration and remembered Time Machine and, bless its little cotton socks, there they all were. And swiftly recovered to boot.

By the by, I disagree with your statement 'but it is not actually so obvious how to recover'

If you can use Finder then you can use Time Machine (or should be able to!!). Click and hit Restore. Simples.

[Dave2002]

A couple of points here. Indeed I was able to restore a file - even a folder, by the process you mentioned. There was a glitch though, which makes me slightly suspicious. I did this first as a test, having deliberately used some files which were sufficiently old enough to have been captured in TM over a period. I was hoping that I'd get an option about where to save the recovered file, but that's not what happened. What seems to happen is that when Restore is pressed, the file is copied back into the folder from whence it came. That was OK, but then I looked at TM again.

At that point, I could see no earlier instances of the same file, so I assumed that my attempt to restore the file had somehow lost information about earlier copies. I gave up and went away. Some while later I came back and noticed that TM had been doing a backup around the time when I restored the file the first time, and that the earlier copies of the file were then visible. So in fact although TM does seem to work reasonably well, it has quirks which may be disconcerting to users who aren't aware of what it might do. I think the answer is to take Mr Jones' advice "Don't panic, Mr Mannering!"

Putting files back where they came from seems reasonable enough, though that's not always what one wants to do. I'm not quite sure what happens if there is another version of the file in the same location, either.

The other point is regarding Mail. Have Apple disabled mail actually installed on machines, and forced it all into their iCloud? We have recently been having problems with mail. The problems could be due to changes at the ISP (one is TalkTalk) but could also be due to Apple and their wretched approach to iCloud. I don't mind them developing iCloud, but I don't want to use it. I expect things to carry on working whether I use it or not. I suspect that sometimes they change things so that users do get forced on to it - though it's only a suspicion at present. For whatever reason, mail on a couple of our Apple devices has been very iffy in the last few weeks.

[Anastasius]

You really do seem to have it in for Apple.

With regard to "I'm not quite sure what happens if there is another version of the file in the same location, either." for example, a very simple test, had you bothered to try restoring a small file would have shown you that :

TM tells you that there is a file already existing in the folder and so do you want to replace, keep both or keep the original. You then get prompted for the Amin password. Now what could be easier or simpler than that. OK ...you might want to beef about the fact that you can't at that point alter the restore location but, come on, when you look at the big picture and what Time Machine has done for you, is it really that much of an issue?

I have never seen your suggestion that TM drops other versions of the file either. I just checked after my restore and previous versions are still there. I'd put it down to user error.

Yes, Apple do mess things up from time to time but, to be honest, reading the tenet of the majority of your posts, one could be forgiven for thinking that they are dropping the ball time and time again.

Take your comment regarding Apple Mail? Working fine at this end. Don't you think that if they had done what you are suggesting that the blogosphere would be in meltdown? No, I don't either. So if it comes to a question of 'Is it TalkTalk or Apple' then no question....TalkTalk. You'll probably find that if you check out their Twitter page that there will be loads of posts about it...one of the few advantages of Twitter, I guess, as more and more techy companies use it as a "real-time status of service" information channel. Are you in the North West? TalkTalk had problems there today/recently. It's all there if you look.