Leopard’s Time Machine backups driving Mac users to insanity
Apple positions the Time Machine backup feature in Leopard as one of the best improvements in OSX to date only it doesn’t work correctly 100% of the time. In fact, many Apple users are finding it difficult to get it to work correctly even part of the time.
ComputerWorld reports that many Mac users are not happy with the way Time Machine is working not working. Users backing up their machines for the first time have had the backup fail as little as 10% complete and as much as 90% complete, the error is usually, “Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume.”
Forgive me but that sounds like something Windows would say, “An error occurred while retrieving the update.” Both messages don’t help troubleshoot the underlying issue.
However, Apple has responded by saying that some of the drives being used by Mac owners are not formatted to accept Time Machine backups. I guess that’s the Apple way, format your drive so it can accept backups.
There are instructions for both PowerPC and Intel Mac users on how and what to format their backup drives as.
Once the drive is formatted, it should be safe to begin the backup procedure again. But users should still note that backup names can only contain alphanumeric characters and no special characters.
Complaints go beyond that with some saying Time Machine will randomly rename drives, delete files and corrupt restore operations.
Some have gone so far as to blame LaCie which supplies many external drives to Mac users and LaCie is defending itself on the various forums where Mac users have been complaining.
All in all using Time Machine is a lot like using System Restore on Windows XP or Vista, you never know what you are going to end up with when all is said and done.
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I’ve been using Time Machine since it existed on an EIDE drive and just today I noticed the error and found this post. What’s going on, Steve? Apple needs to tighten up. I’m going to blog about this cluster fook soon