Feed
 

Time machine

Avatar Graham Caves
Hello Chaps,

I was trying to do a backup this morning which was going to be 2.22 GB so not a huge amount.

Now when you start this procedure open System preferences, select time machine and it says
Next Backup Today 09.00 say.

When the backup starts Next Backup changes to Backing up and a blue and white striped bar travels across as a progress bar. It took about 15 minutes to prepare 2.22GB!!

The backup then started and after another 20 mins only 60MB had been backed up.

This was only backing up the Mac HD so no external HDs in this.

Can anyone tell me if this is a TM problem or is it something more terminal in the Mac?

Maybe the Hard drive starting to fail?

If anyone has any ideas about this any help would be very much appreciated.

Hope this all makes sense. Many thanks Graham

Re: Time machine

Avatar Euan Williams
Graham, Don't panic. Time Machine doesn't do a straight copy as would happen if you just drag and drop your files from one partition to another. This is why doing a Time Machine backup of, for example, a Gb of photos which you haven't edited -- and don't intend to edit (could) be wasteful of processing time and stress your drives unnecessarily.

To understand Time Machine and how it works (and why it isn't always the best solution to backing up especially when used by itself) try reading this general explanation. Wikipedia has more complex information if you are interested:

> http://Pondini.org/TM/Works.html <

If you want to spare your hard drives, use Time Machine only as actually necessary and never as an hourly universal backup solution.

Re: Time machine

Avatar Graham Caves
Hello Euan,

Thank you for the link to that article on Time Machine.

I have read it several times now and each time it becomes a bit clearer - but I do get the general point of it.

It seems that the way you link to TM makes a huge difference as well time wise - at least I can hope there is nothing wrong with my Macs HD!!!
 
Feed