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March 19, 2008
Score One for Time Machine
Backups aren't a new idea - and while the cynic in me says that "all" Time Machine is is a fancy interface on top of some old ideas (like rdiff-backup), I have to hand it to Apple.
It works.
Once you get around the silly-arsed restrictions, that is.
The other day I realized that I had to figure out the backup strategy for Dawnise's new iMac. Previously, I had a scheduled backup job on our ReadyNAS do an incremental backup of her "Documents and Settings" directory every night and a full backup once a week. I decided to use this fancy "Time Machine" thing everyone was talking about.
Only it will only talk to a locally attached (USB/Firewire/SATA) drive or an Apple-made Time Capsule, neither of which really solves my problem - which is to get the backup physically decoupled from her machine, and on to reliable (RAIDed) storage.
Fortunately, other people had already found the work-around to that particular restriction, so I figured I'd give it a go. There were lots of horror stories about Time Machine mis-behaving when pointed at a nearly full SMB (Windows) share, the ReadyNAS speaks AFP, so I figured I had a reasonable chance of success.
I got it setup, limited it to 500GB of backup storage (another feature Apple didn't see fit to make easily accessible via the UI) and fired it up.
Today we reaped the benefit.
Dawnise uses Firefox and the Session Manager plugin.
And she uses tabs.
Lots of tabs.
More tabs than that, even.
This occasionally really annoys Firefox, and sends it into a death spiral.
It happened to her today, and while I couldn't quite give her the right directions driving blind from work, once I got home it was pretty straight forward to use Time Machine to restore her session state from shortly before it got corrupted.
It "just worked."
Once I get my machine stable (parts arrive Friday) I think I'm going to move my home directory off the NAS back onto local disk, and use the NAS as the target for something like rdiff-backup for my own data.
Sure, it won't have the swirly space graphic behind it, but on the other hand, I'm not convinced that Time Machine actually solves the DR problem, as it secrets data away in a proprietary format (sparsebundle) - so if her Mac ever goes tango-uniform, we need another mac to recover the data.
Posted by dberger at March 19, 2008 8:07 PM