time machine

When I first saw the official video promoting OSX v.5 (take the tour), one of the things I was most impressed with was Time Machine, a backup solution that allows to you fly back through time and recover data in a very slick way. Now that my external hard drive has finally arrived, I can give this a try – and finally back up my main disk.

The first snafu was that the external disk came formatted in NTFS, which OSX doesn't like. It's mounted as read-only, and Time Machine refuses it as a backup device but offers to format it (ever the helpful assistant). I went with that, but only after burning the data on the drive, Maxtor's own backup software + manuals, to CD – just in case. Now the icon on the desktop doesn't show a USB drive anymore but a Time Machine Backup. I configured Time Machine for the initial full backup, but five hours later, when I was ready to call it a day, the job wasn't even close to done. I turned the computer off, to be continued the next day.

This day is today. I started my system and learned from the Time Machine entry in System Preferences that the next backup was scheduled to start an hour from now. Hallo Mac! There is no obvious way of starting things now. The obscure way is to put the Time Machine icon into the sidebar and right-click it. Backup now is one option, but returned an error, caused most probably by yesterday's unfinished job. Once all files were removed from the external drive, things started to move.

Unfortunately, they still moved only glacially. After two hours, not more than 4GB had been written to the disk. At this pace, my weekend would not start before Sunday morning. The solution I finally found in a macrumors forum involves excluding the backup drive from Spotlight and disabling the virus scanner's Safe Zones (both in System Preferences).

An hour or two from now, the initial backup should be finished and hourly incrementals will be created as long as I keep the backup drive connected. I hope this works smoothly even when file scanning is reactivated.

good and going

This is probably the last post in a while. I'm getting used to the MacBook. I took it home over Christmas just by sliding it into my backpack between t-shirts, chocolates and books. It's very slim indeed.

Before I fall silent, I can't help but ask what's up with the laptop's drives. I've mentioned the idiocy of a hard disk that's unchangeable by the average user's grandmother. The DVD drive presents another example. It doesn't have a tray that slides out. Instead, you slide the disk into a thin slit. All fine normally. However, when things don't go normally, e.g. when a disk is not recognized after being inserted, you have a problem. The disk that doesn't show up on the Desktop cannot be ejected, on my computer anyway. A friend told me that the button in the top right corner always activates the ejection mechanism, but that's not the case for me. There is no button on the drive, and there is no pinhole to force-open the drive. On two occasions (trying to watch pirated DVDs, admittedly), a had to shut down the computer to get things working again.

This is not something I do regularly and not something that will drive me up the wall. So, for the record, I go so far as to say that I'd love the Mac if I could pick my own hardware. If there were only one hundredth the number of OSX-compatible laptops as there are Windows-compatible machines, I'd surely find something right. With the operating system itself, I don't have major issues (short of a real Alt key that gets me into an application's menu bar quickly and easily).

And that's it, folks.