Whatever happened to Benjamin Ragheb? » Time Machine http://www.benzado.com/blog A professional's personal blog. Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:06:07 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 WTF, Time Machine? http://www.benzado.com/blog/post/107/wtf-time-machine http://www.benzado.com/blog/post/107/wtf-time-machine#comments Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:44:32 +0000 Benjamin http://www.benzado.com/blog/?p=107 For a while I was feeling pretty good about making the switch from whenever-I-get-around-to-doing-it backups with SuperDuper to hourly-in-the-background backups with Time Machine. But today I noticed that, even after more than a week, no history shows up when I attempt to “time travel”.

Then I find TS1760: “In the Mac OS X 10.5 Time Machine ‘time travel’ window, past backups may not appear if your computer name includes certain characters.”

The solution is to update to 10.5.5 or later. I’m pretty sure I had done that long before I set up Time Machine.

What the hell?

My computer name was “BR’s MacBook”. I renamed it to “BR MacBook” and, later, “BRMacBook”. So far I have learned:

  • Time Machine does not freak out and renames the root backup folder appropriately.
  • I am still unable to “time travel”.
  • Many people on the Internet have reported the existence of this problem but nobody has claimed to have found a solution to it.

What did I do to deserve this?

UPDATE: Apparently the way to time travel in this configuration is to option-click the Time Machine menu item (or ctrl-click the Dock icon) and select “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”. I found this out by browsing Apple’s discussion forums directly instead of simply assuming that Google knew it all.

]]> http://www.benzado.com/blog/post/107/wtf-time-machine/feed 0 Time Machine automatically finds your sparse image http://www.benzado.com/blog/post/68/time-machine-automatically-finds-your-sparse-image http://www.benzado.com/blog/post/68/time-machine-automatically-finds-your-sparse-image#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:12:40 +0000 Benjamin http://www.benzado.com/blog/?p=68 Yesterday I followed Erik J. Barzeski’s instructions to configure Time Machine to backup to a sparse bundle disk image on my Drobo. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to tell Time Machine to use the disk image and not the whole disk; eventually I discovered that if you just select the disk, Time Machine finds the properly named disk image and automatically uses that. So, if you happen to think like me, I hope this note has saved you a few minutes of confusion.

Other things I’ve learned:

  • Changing the volume name of the backup disk during a backup will cause the backup to fail and start over again. Not a big deal.
  • If you want your backup disk to have a nice looking Time Machine icon, you can find it in the file GenericTimeMachineDiskIcon.icns in the folder /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources.
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