• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Apple Time Machine ...rock on !

RogerS

RogerS

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Unbeknownst to me until today I must have been fiddling around with things on 18 November. Can't recall exactly. Might have been trying El Crappo, dunno...but what I did know this afternoon as that my iPhoto library of 18 November had been rebuilt and lost all photos since 2010.

And because I wasn't aware of this, I happily carried out my normal backup routines. Which backed up the corrupted library.

Time Machine :idea: I also kept a TM copy and so went back in time to 11 November and Restored my 20GB iPhoto library (uncorrupted version).

All systems are go. Bloody brilliant bit of software !

Having said that I've just ordered a £20 external drive to do a complete copy... a snapshot of both mine and my wife's libraries.
 
For those of us using PC's I'd recommend Veeam Endpoint backup. It's free and backs up to a schedule to whatever you choose as a backup location. Each backup is a restore point and you can choose bare metal (ie restore from a PC where the hardware is dead) or single /multiple file for the date you want. After the first full backup subsequent ones are incremental.

https://www.veeam.com/endpoint-backup-free.html

I have it on my home server. The server backs up all our PCs - desktop and laptops and Veeam backs up the server to a plug in drive. All done automatically. Now and then I swap the 5Tb plug in drive and take the backup to my daughters place for safe keeping so if a burglar took every computer item in the house we'd still have all our videos and pictures etc.

Always good when having decent backup proves its worth.
 
Out of curiosity, how often do you do a complete restore from the backup, Robert ?
 
RogerS":134ocypv said:
Out of curiosity, how often do you do a complete restore from the backup, Robert ?
Click to expand...

I've done it a couple of times when upgrading hard drives in laptops. Take the old drive out, fit the new one, boot from media created by the backup program (usb stick or DVD usually) and restore the backup to the new drive. It is clever enough to backup network drivers etc required for recovery into the boot media so the whole thing is pretty simple.

I could have just cloned the drives but it gives an opportunity to reassure myself that recovery will work if ever needed.
 
On the face of it, you have things covered. My only reservation would be to ask what the timeframe was between doing these. Just because it worked, say, a year ago when you made a system change doesn't mean that it will work today. Case in point was my iPhoto library. I'd not used it since middle of November and so had no idea that it was corrupted (and therefore that also meant the daily backups).

Having said all that, it is a while since I did a boot-up from the backup :oops:
 
I almost totally agree with you Roger, apart from I have lost no small amount of faith in it recently...

I am still running OSX Lion because I've never felt the need for any of the new features and its bedrock stable. Over recent months obviously support for it is coming to an end and things are starting to become incompatible with Safari, notes won't sync, I can't manually backup my iPhone since iOS 10 etc.

I finally got annoyed enough to click the upgrade button to go to El Crapitan (obviously after confirming existence and stability of my most recent full time machine backup).

Upgrade process went fine and up pops El Crappo and all was well, until I tried to open email at which point the screens became covered in artefacts and over 30 seconds the machine completely locked up requiring a hard reboot.

Bit of tinkering and I decided just to restore it and do some googling before having another go.

All fine with the boot into restore mode and it restored fine (albeit taking around 18 hours!!!) but it was back to exactly where it was before I started, or was it...

The first time it tried an incremental backup (does one every hour) it complained it couldn't see the time capsule so long story short, though the backups and restore worked perfectly, post restore the Lion instance could no longer access the sparsebundle (the file that time machine creates to store all your backups in) and I had to manually delete all the files in a very time consuming process before formatting the TC drive and doing a full backup again. The whole time this was happening I was at risk of losing everything.

So while I still rely on it and think it's great, I now have serious reservations about its absolute infallibility so be warned...

Cheers
Mark
 
Roger's Rule No.1 - Never, ever use Time Machine as a whole-machine backup/restore for all the reasons you have given !!
 
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