Bournemouth — Apr 21st 2015
Time Machine was introduced with Leopard in 2007, and underwent a major change in 2012. One consequence of that change is that doing a full system restore from a pre-2012 backup poses problems (If you really need to do it, ask John - he has a way!). Restoration of individual files and folders still works normally though.
Having reminded us of why we might want to backup, John went on to look at what we should backup. This highlighted one of the advantages of Time Machine in that it will back up various things such as Keychains, Contacts, iOS backups, Network Settings etc. which are easily forgotten when backing up manually.
Apple recommend using an external hard drive of at least three times the capacity of the Mac's internal drive. It was generally agreed though that the figure of 3x should be applied to the amount of data to be backed up rather than the drive's capacity, since many iMac drives never get anywhere near full.
Apple's Time Capsule provides a wireless alternative to a conventional external drive but, whatever drive is used, it must be formatted in Mac OS extended (journaled) [and not case-sensitive].
Next, John covered how to set up Time Machine and demonstrated its use, both to make a backup and to restore a file. He then detailed how to do a full system restore, booting the Mac from the recovery partition and using the Utilities menu.
Time Machine's scheduling and organisation was then described. It tends to be faster than many other backup apps because it has access to the OS X log of file changes.
John then described other ways to use Time Machine, which led directly into considerable discussion on manually initiated backups, backing up external drives, and trying to spot the pattern in members' different experiences of Time Machine nagging them about not having done a backup recently!
After the usual coffee break, the Q&A session started with a few more backup related questions, went on to an issue about using Viewscan with a new all-in-one printer and then, perhaps unsurprisingly, moved on to the new Photos app, where several seemingly absent features were successfully flushed out of hiding.
This was a relatively select gathering with only nine members present. Nonetheless, it was an excellent meeting with an informative talk followed by a Q&A session in which I believe everyone learned something - especially about Photos, which I'm sure will feature in many more Q&A sessions in future!
TJH 22-4-15
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