was too small for the amount of data I had.

There's plenty of space for incremental backups--have used one machine with one drive and the other machine with two drives for > a year (with automatic deletions after a certain period) and had no problems until last week, when BOTH Macs had problems with these drives, and with a new drive I had bought when I was hoping that the problem was drives going bad.

Users are talking about it here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4324046?start=255&tstart=0

The fix proposed there worked for some but didn't work for me.

Still no solution from Apple.

Erase your backup drive and use it as a target drive for Carbon Copy Cloner. It's a free, slick drive mirroring program - it makes a perfect, bit-for-bit copy of one drive onto another. If your primary drive fails, you literally put a new one in, boot off your backup since it's a clone of your main drive, OS and all, and carbon copy back to the new drive. It can be automated to backup on your chosen schedule; it's not QUITE as integrated as Time Machine and lacks some candy like the selective rollbacks, but for a simple, efficient backup system it's probably the best there is

ed - I just noticed the little line at the bottom saying CCC is now commercial, $40. I guess it depends on how badly you want backups...or you can teach yourself how to use Terminal to schedule a cron job that runs dd to clone your primary to the backup, since that's basically what CCC does.

Last edited Mon Oct 1, 2012, 12:23 PM - Edit history (1)

Worth every penny.

I still use Time Machine, though.

We use a lot of backup. My MacPro is my main machine. I do a CC to an external drive and an internal drive. I also do a Time Machine to an internal machine. If one drive fails, it can boot to the other and not miss a step. The Time Machine allows me to dial back a file to an earlier version if I somehow hose it.

I also CC my data files to yet another drive here in the office.

Once a week, I CC that local remote drive to a drive connected to my partner's machine in another city. If a volcano were to erupt and swallow us, that drive will still be functional and bootable.

We also use SugarSync to backup and share the project files we're actually working on.

edit to add: We use Time Machine and CC on all our machines. Only my MacPro gets the belt, suspenders, and safety pins of multiple redundant back-up schemes.

Haven't tried it yet, because their screwup ruined three backup drives (one for one Mac and two for another), so it will take a long time to back up from scratch.

Users can download it from Software Update.

I will definitely investigate CC. Thanks to you both.

If you are, or are interested in becoming (it's an incredibly useful skillset to have on OSX), here's a quick tutorial on using launchd to schedule a repeating task. All you'd need to set would be "sudo dd if=<startup disk> of=<backup disk>" to run however often you'd like; that's essentially all CCC does, just with a pretty frontend. Cheers!

If you toss an mkfs in before you dd to the same target drive every time you aren't making multiple copies, just one latest copy. That's what I grew up with (straight nightlies to tape, a simple cron job actually - our admin insisted "simple is best&quot so I learned to just save copies of my data if I thought I might need to roll back. If I didn't make a copy, or I trashed a file, it was gone and oh well shouldn't have done that.

I get Time Machine, I use it, I like it - but I'm still in the "save a copy" and "Empty Trash is forever" mindset. Never actually used it to roll back, just to copy my stuff from my G4 that one time. I also much prefer H-gate manual transmissions over flappy-boxes and especially slush-o-matics if that says anything..