“Mike Mihalik, an ombudsman and former vice president of engineering at LaCie Ltd., criticized Apple’s testing before the company launched its new Leopard operating system,” Gregg Keizer reports for CoOmputerworld. “‘The two tech notes that it’s released clarify what Apple should have done as part of the normal release,’ said Mihalik, referring to a pair of recent support documents that address problems users have reported with the backup tool. Instead, he said, it was as if Apple ‘Said ‘oops, we forgot to check that,'”
“‘What’s disconcerting is that what we as developers saw over the last couple of months is not what was delivered to customers,’ he said. ‘Apple made changes after the last developer update, and it’s not the same,'” Keizer reports. “Specifically, said Mihalik, Apple disabled the ability to backup using Time Machine to a network share. ‘They made the right decision; it’s not stable,’ he said. ‘But it’s also an indication of other problems.'”
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s Website states, “You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.” Apple pulled wireless backup from the initial Mac OS X Leopard release.
Keizer reports, “Among those problems, he said, were oversights that Apple only recently corrected in the two support documents, one of which spelled out how to set up a drive to work with Time Machine [as well as] that of computer names including nonalphanumeric characters causing backups to not appear in the Time Machine interface, should also have been noted — and a blocker put into place to prevent improper names, he added.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: See the related Apple Support Docs:
• Master Boot Record issue: Mac OS X 10.5: Time Machine stops backing up to external disk
• Computer names with nonalphanumeric characters issue: Mac OS X 10.5: Time Machine backups are not visible
This is not valid criticism of Apple or the product itself. The overwhelming plus is the release and thereafter small ‘undocumented’ enhancements are brought to bear.
Tru Dat!!!
In the article they are stating that Apple killed the support for backing up to a network share?
Quoted from the apple website
” . . . . Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.”
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html
Am I missing something here?
Time Machine working fine for me. over 600gig being backed up.
Time Machine didn’t do sh!t for me!
I tried to go back to when APPL was $50.00……
Why doesn’t this surprise me?
Apple has been notable absent on the fine details lately.
1: Not updating the open source components of Mac OS X to keep up with security issues.
2: Putting out Lepoard in order to sell off outdated hardware.
3: Glossy screens.
4: Bricking hacked iPhones.
Where the hell does it end?
The abuse is terrible!
(i’m joking of course)
He’s right, you know.
I’ve lost my protective coating!
Is that why I have a tail? Or am I just sitting too close to myself?
Hell.
“Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices”
This statement is not completely true. We have machines that can’t see other machines even if they meet the requirements. Some can see only the boot drive on the other machines.
Time Machine can see a drive one minute and then not see it the next minute.
I assume 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 will correct these problems.
– Brian Allen
The vital phrase here is “network share”.
Don’t be an ass Max..
What Apple HAS achieved with OSX has never been done before…it’s 32bit, 64bit, Intel AND PPC, and it brings in ZFS and numerous other under the hood changes.
No other operating system can come close to what Apple is achieving with this and instead of whining and moaning you ought to be saying how frigging AMAZING the thing works AT ALL…
Excuse the shouting but jeeeze…
Personally, I’m very impressed by Time Machine so far. It has been making incremental backups of my 40GB Home directory for about ten days, yet the total size of the backup directory is about the same size as the original source directory.
One day I was in the middle of manually cloning my boot drive when Time Machine started its automatic hourly backup. To my surprise, both copying operations proceeded smoothly to completion with no complaint and no problems afterwords.
From where I stand, Time Machine appears to have been very thoroughly tested and seems to be working like a charm.
To those who are upset with Apple for not including wireless backup in the initial Leopard release: What kind of moron writes off an otherwise brilliant product because of a single missing feature?
Time Machine has been working great for me as well. Over 400 gigs from two internal drives in my PowerMac G5. Of course my drives don’t have weird ass names with uncommon characters and all my drives are HFS+.
Time Machine is a pretty revolutionary technology — to expect Apple to get it “perfect” on the .0 release is flattering, but unrealistic. The vast, vast majority of users have had little or no trouble implementing it (including moi). By the time we get to 10.5.2, or thereabouts, the residual issues will be fixed and, in all likelihood, the ability to back-up to a network storage device shared over Airport will be restored.
In short, Mike Mihalik’s concerns may be valid, but that does not make them meaningful. Nowadays, computer operating systems are not snapshots, but evolving works. In my book, Leopard is unquestionably the best OS I have used in almost 30 years of PC experience. That is a great place to start, and if Apple’s track record is any indication, it will only get better.
I have had zero problems with TM on a new iMac here. My MacBook did have problems such that it took 24 hours to back up just 2 GBs. I reinstalled Leo as an update (the original install was an A&I;) and it’s been working fine ever since. But both are to the cheapie Iomega HD’s. No network attempts yet until I hear all is well with it.
I totally agree with this guy’s assessment.
A good portion of us out here are on laptops all day, and the thought of being tied down by a wired “Boat Anchor” external drive is hardly what I would call cutting edge!
Being able to back up to a LEGITIMATE NAS, seems like a no-brainer, but as the guy pointed out, there were obvious stability issues that forced Apple to pull the feature at the last minute.
As soon as I learned that TM did not support a TRUE NAS, my desire to upgrade vanished.
Between that and a host of other issues, I am content to continue to use Tiger for the foreseeable future, and Super Duper will have to serve as my Network backup solution.
No problems with TM. MacPro, and MacBook. Daily backups from drives totaling over 2 TB.
I wonder what I’ll do, though, if I have to restore to another machine?
Gonna keep making “static whole-file” backups weekly.
@ Macaday
I agree with you, the under the hood changes that Apple has delivered with Leopard is completely outstanding. The 32/64 bit support is very difficult to achieve, along with the ZFS support…
Not to mention making Leopard UNIX compliant. I am surprised they did not break more things than they did.
No OS ever made comes close to what OS X Leopard has accomplished. They will earn out the bugs over time.
Apple has set the quality bar so high, that they are not allowed to have the occasional mishaps.
Its easy to say test for everything, and every possible user scenario, but in practice its very hard to do. Some test can’t be done until the rubber hits the road.
Go Apple! Leopard is the best general purpose OS on the planet! Can anyone name a general purpose OS that is better?
I didn’t think so….
“how frigging AMAZING the thing works AT ALL…”
you’re right dickwad, most people are surprised that the BSD / Mach university research project / Apple kludge that you call an operating system works at all. Fortunately nobody uses it for any serious work, so it’s limitations are not likely to be discovered by most Apple customers.
When will my mac be upgraded to 10.4.10?
10.5.2 will be out before it happens I guess.
Oh well.
wf
You’re a jackass.
And a liar.
I really don’t care how Apple screwed this up. I want them to fix network share backup soon. I want to get my LaCie RAID 1 1TB NAS for Christmas and this shit is screwing my plan!!!!!
Just my $0.02
I’ve never trusted things like this. The way I back up? I find what i want to backup and stick on an external HD or a DVD/CD/usb stick MANUALY so I know whats going on. What happens if you have a power failute during a backup or you/your kid trips and yanks the cable out (be nice if usb/firwire headphone etc were all magnetic to)
It’s like computer controled cars they’re supposedly working on. Do you realy trust a machine that much that you would get in your car fall asleep and trust it to get you home safely?
I would be interested in other people’s experience on how much HD space might be needed compared to the original to be backed up. In know it will vary, but if we took a quick survey, might help many of us.
Wow. Lots of idiots here tonight.
Don’t like Apple’s solution, use Retrospect.
I’d like to see the average user try that.