As of last summer I was doing all my music and design work on a PowerMac G4 Dual 500MHz with 512mb of RAM running OS X 10.3 Panther (roar!). When it became evident that I couldn’t put off upgrading any longer I decided that I wanted to get a laptop. A MacBook Pro to be more precise. I reasoned that it would not only be a far quicker machine than I was used to but I could realise my long held dream of being to work out on the balcony, splayed spread-eagle on the living room floor, under a tree in the park or just somewhere other than my desk. Great! I figured it would take me quite a while to save the $1500 odd for one. Bummer. Then I figured it would take me a mere fraction of that to get a mac mini that could tide me over while I saved up over all those summers for that coveted piece of aluminium and whizz-bang Intel chips. So that’s what I did.
Mostly hit and a little miss
Two and a half months later I’m loving the minute mac. It feels faster than I thought it would and that’s with just 1Gb of RAM. Coming from Panther, I’m loving Leopard - mostly. I use Spotlight so much I have no idea how I coped having to click through folders! Finder seems to be all over the place with how it remembers which mode to display contents. And maybe I’m missing something here but why do I have to manually tell it to arrange icons (by name, date or whatever) in grid mode? It’s a good job Spotlight works so well for me because the vein in my temple starts pulsing when I see icons scattered around in a finder window. The whole dock controversy didn’t affect me much because I always have my dock on the right-hand side and in Leopard it looks quite normal.
RAID for idiots
Anyway, it was Time Machine that prompted me to write something so I’ll meander my way back on topic. Years and years ago, back in my pre-mac days, I had a hard drive fail on me. Well, not just “a” drive but “the” drive - C:/. It was the only drive I had so I lost everything. Since then I always make a copy of something important and put it on a different drive. Kinda like RAID for dummies. Or RAID for the stupid. Well now I have Time Machine I have the luxury of having everything backed up, even my endless minor revisions of the same file. And best of all Apple have made it so easy (and fun!) to navigate through the 100s of Gbs of backups. Data is nothing unless you can do something with it.
Time Machine sends my backups back to the dark ages
This week I started getting errors from Time Machine saying something along the lines of “Time Machine Error, Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume.” The drive seemed fine, I could read and write to it and when Disk Utility said it appeared OK I went googling for an answer. And I didn’t like what I found. It appeared that Time Machine drives that were formatted using a PowerPc machine (like mine was) used a different method of formatting to what Time Machine secretly wants. It’s still usable, but only up to a point and then it’s unable to back up anymore (if you’ve been paying attention in this paragraph this should be sounding familiar to you). To give Time Machine what it really wants involves reformatting the drive to get rid of the Master Boot Record partition scheme. For me involved losing about three months of backups as I didn’t have any room anywhere to make a backup of my backups. Apparently this little oversight has been rectified with 10.5.1 builds of Leopard so that on first run, it isn’t shy about converting the free space on the drive into what it deeply, passionately wants.
So the moral of this story is that if you’re new to Leopard, update to 10.5.1 before initialising Time Machine. If you’ve already started Time Machine on a drive you’ve had before Leopard, you might want to look into making a backup of your backups and reformatting that drive. Please note that because I didn’t have the option of saving what Time Machine had backed up, I didn’t investigate how easy it was to just copy and paste the old backups to their original location after reformatting. You could be left with a bunch of files Time Machine doesn’t recognise, so be careful.
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