Alaskan Apple Users Group

Apple’s Time Machine BackUp

Posted September 26th, 2008 by garymiller

Strengths and Weaknesses of Time Machine
by Claire J Rottenberg
CJRTOOLS ebooks

Like many other Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) users, I use Time Machine for backing up data. As good as Time Machine is, however, it is not perfect and probably should not be the only backup option you use. In this article, I describe some of the strengths and weaknesses of Time Machine and offer suggestions for other backup options that can be used to supplement Time Machine.

Strengths of Time Machine
Time Machine’s greatest strength is probably its automatic functioning. Once you’ve set up Time Machine, you can forget about it because Time Machine will automatically back up your files every hour. It works quietly in the background so you don’t need to stop working on your computer while Time Machine is backing up your files.

Another advantage of Time Machine is that backups are cumulative and incremental. Once an initial backup is completed, Time Machine will back up only new or changed files so subsequent backups are quicker and take up less storage space than the original backup. In addition, Time Machine will keep making incremental backups until you run out of disk space on the backup drive. In other words, your backup drive can contain several months worth of files before some files need to be deleted. This can be a particularly useful feature for certain backup tasks, such as saving archived files of business or financial data.

Time Machine’s restore feature for individual files and folders is one of its greatest strengths. Time Machine lets you search for files by location and date or by using Spotlight. Once you’ve found the file you want, you only need to click a button to restore it.

A final positive aspect of Time Machine is that you can back up files from multiple drives or partitions to the same backup drive. This is an especially useful feature if you partition your drive or if you have several drives attached to your computer.

Weaknesses of Time Machine
Although Time Machine has some excellent features, it doesn’t let you create a bootable clone of your hard drive. If your drive dies or the system becomes corrupted, the process to restore your system with Time Machine can be long and complicated, especially compared to the ease of restoring with a cloning application, such as SuperDuper! If you’re backing up your entire drive with Time Machine, to restore the system, you have to boot into the Mac OS X Install disk and wait while your entire system is restored. If your hard drive has died, you are without a working system until you replace the drive. In contrast, with a cloned drive, you can boot into the backup drive and start working with it immediately.

Another downside of Time Machine is that the initial setup for Time Machine can be confusing and time-consuming. Instead of selecting files to include in a backup, which would clearly be the most logical way to set up backup files, with Time Machine you have to select the files to exclude from a backup.

Another weakness of Time Machine is that, over time, your backup files can consume huge amounts of storage space so you will probably need a large drive for your Time Machine backups. With the difficult financial problems many people are facing today, the cost of purchasing a large extra hard drive just for Time Machine can put a strain on an already limited budget.

A final weakness of Time Machine is that you can’t back up files to CDs or DVDs. Since it’s always a good idea to have off-site backups of critical data, it would be good if this feature were built into Time Machine.

Programs to Supplement Time Machine
There are several excellent free or low-cost backup programs you can download, as well as some Apple programs you might already own, to add backup features missing in Time Machine.

The first type of backup application you should have in addition to Time Machine is a cloning program. This type of program will let you create an exact copy of your main drive and, in an emergency, you can immediately boot into the clone and start working with it. Two excellent cloning programs are Carbon Copy Cloner (www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html) and SuperDuper! (www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper). CCC is donationware and you can view some tutorials for using it on my Leopard Tips website (homepage.mac.com/cjrtools/mac-leopard-tips/leopard-tutorials/leopard-video-tutorials.html). SuperDuper! is free for basic cloning, but for more advanced features, such as incremental cloning, you need to pay a small shareware fee ($27.95).

If you are a MobileMe subscriber, Apple has provided you with Backup, an application that lets you back up files to your iDisk, a hard drive or CDs or DVDs. With Backup, you can create custom, scheduled backups so, as with Time Machine, the backups can occur while you’re working on other tasks.

If you use iTunes and iPhoto, those applications have built-in backup features that let you easily save your valuable music and photo collections to CDs or DVDs. A free alternative to iPhoto, Kodak EasyShare (www.kodak.com), comes with a built-in backup update feature that lets you know when you should back up your photo library to a CD or DVD.

Conclusion
Time Machine is an excellent, unique backup option, but it is missing features that can be easily supplemented with free Apple and third-party alternatives. So, even if you use Time Machine, you should consider adding a cloning program and applications for saving valuable data to CDs or DVDs.

Claire J Rottenberg is the author of Easy Guides to Mac OS X software (Safari, Mail, System Preferences, TextEdit) and Course Books on Mac OS X 10.5, iPhoto ‘08, iTunes, and Mac OS X 10.4. More information on her books is available on the CJRTOOLS ebooks website (www.cjrtools.com/ebooks). Members of Apple user groups can receive a 25% discount on all purchases from CJRTOOLS ebooks, more information on the offer can be found on the Apple User Group Offers web page (homepage.mac.com/ugab/offers.html).