Apple testing new Backup update

I had to restore twice--and both times it didn't work. I took my iBook to the local genius and still no dice. It's a lousy appplication.

"Thayne Miller" I find your answer quite rude and over the top.

No matter "how small" the files are you will eventually reach the capacity.

Say you want to backup a 60MB folder, with the latest contents everyday. You don't want to put it on removable media, as that media is stored on the same location, so it just a vulnerable to fire/flood damage as the computer.

If Backup 2 was as elegant as the rest of Apple's software it would handle this in an elegant manner...

a) By letting the user specify how many days they wish to keep backed up.
b) When the capacity is reached, display a dialog asking which days the user would like to remove.
c) At the very least let the use clear space on the iDisk from within the backup UI, not through the finder.

If backup was so good, there would be no need for Time Machine. You wouldn't have Apple's own employees going on stage at a keynote and admitting they know they should backup, but don't.

Displaying an ambiguous error message is not a very elegant way to deal with the problem of running out of capacity. In general error handling is pretty poor. The only thing it tells you is "backup has failed". You then have the option to read the console, which is quite daunting for what is essentially a consumer app.

For the person who asked about mounting a sparseimage, I went through this last spring when my filevault home dir got trashed because there was a disk image in the middle of it (courtesy of my 2 year old trying to toss my macbook pro across the room). Here's what I found. First, you try to use Disk Utility to repair it. If that doesn't work, which it wouldn't when there was a disk error in the middle, the best solution I found was to use "Data Rescue II", which was able to extract all the files that were not corrupt from the disk image into another newly created sparseimage. I got almost everything; just had to do it again on my wifes machine when her macbook developed a disk error in her sparseimage home dir.

Backup.app workes fine as long as you don't have to restore the data. I've been backing to a HFS+-formatted USB-disk for a few months, never deleting any of the backup-files. When my hard-drive failed and I tried to restore the data Backup.app grinds to a halt and finally crashes after an hour or two.

I backed up this thing that one time.

I used to use BackUp before I cancelled my .Mac account. I now use BackupRight www.backupright.com on my Powerbook. It backs up everything remotely, on a schedule, notifies me via email, is encrypted during storage and transfer, and even lets me backup to an external drive at the same time. It works great and is LESS expensive than a .Mac subscription.

Also, for those of you who have not tried Time Machine, I can confirm that it will run your backups to a remote drive. I did it to a SMB mounted share on my Windows deskop.

Intresting. I guess that explains the call I got from apple a couple of days ago asking about my back up stratagy here at work.

"Backup to iDisk does not work well.

When it reaches the iDisk capacity, you have to mess around deleting files manually."


hahaha! So... you would rather have backup somehow magically create disk space that isn't there? Or perhaps would you rather have backup just delete old version of files? Backup to iDisk by default only does personal settings and small preference files. If you want your backups to go that far back that you need so much space, then why are you doing it with the small iDisk anyway? Simple solution: delete your iDisk backups and do a new full backup.

THIS IS WHY PEOPLE THINK BACKUP SUCKS: They delete the incremental files thinking that if they delete just the last one, it will effectively cancel the last backup. THIS IS FALSE! If you delete even a SINGLE incremental file, your whole backup is blown. You must then do a full backup to start over. This is stated clearly in the documentation! So when you go to restore from a backup and it doesn't work, maybe you should have followed the instructions.

It's funny that the people that set-and-forget are the ones that have the most success with this software. It's the people that don't follow directions and then blame apple that are at fault here.

I have been using backup for 6 months every single day to backup various things to iDisk, CD/DVD, 2 hard drives, and a network drive. I also use it in combination with an rsync script to take backups of remote files on a fileserver at school. I have restored probably about 20 or 30 times without a hickup. I have blown away my machine and done a complete reinstall many times and I am fully confident that backup is a reliable piece of software. I don't need to wait for time machine because backup is already perfect.

Backup to iDisk does not work well.

When it reaches the iDisk capacity, you have to mess around deleting files manually.

"while Backup is an internet-based solution for copying user selected data and one that can be accessed for any web-accessible Windows or Mac computer."

Jon, thanks for your comments. However, I'm not sure if this is completely accurate. While Backup will back up to one's iDisk, it also will backup to a hard drive, CDs, DVDs, network storage, or pretty much anything else you want. Though it didn't always do these things, it has done them now for many years. I therefore wouldn't call it an "Internet-based solution".

Also, I'm not sure what is meant by "that can be accessed for any web-accessible Windows or Mac computer." If you're talking about backups to an iDisk, well, yes, that's true to a degree. However, it's not in any way what Backup was intended for. Although you can access anyone's iDisk froma Mac or Windows machine, that feature wasn't really included with the intention for people to be able to restore a Backup file/set to a Windows machine. The Backup set is stored in a disk image, which I do not believe is readable on a Windows machine, which would make that impossible. Windows users can access file stored on your iDisk, but just not files that are in that disk image.

The iDisk solution is really a separate utility from Backup, which was intended so that people could access important info from any machine (Mac or Windows). However, Backup is really not a part of that solution (even though Backup will backup info to your iDisk...again, it's in a disk image).

I hope this is helpful, and feel free to point out anything that I've missed, or if I'm uninformed!

Ryan
mgoblue