Trials and time machine

April 17, 2009

Twenty-four hours in it appears I now have a disk migration working. Usually it's a simple task. Unpack the machine and fire up Migration Assistant after going off to make and drink a few cups of coffee and presto the new machine is up and running.

Well that worked for the first many dozens of processors in the collection. This time, however it was not to be so simple. Each time Migration Assistant would run it would exit with the same error message. Read more about Trials and time machine

Starting Time Capsule with only part of the disk

May 17, 2008

With a new laptop to backup to Time Machine the initial backup can be very long. In fact it takes many many hours to get the 100+ GB of my disk backed up. So I tried a different approach that is working quite well so far. Going to the Time Machine preferences on the laptop I setup the Time Capsule as the backup disk and then set Time Machine to exclude most of the top-level folders on the disk. This allows a relatively quick backup to the Time Capsule to succeed. Once that is done then each day when I connect the laptop I can go back to the preferences and remove a folder from the "excluded" list. In this manner I can add a little bit to the backup each day and in the hours the laptop is on at home it slowly all gets added to the backup.

Time Capsule time out

April 13, 2008

It is now somewhat ironic that I made a quick post about Time Capsule on Friday. It seems mine is deciding to be a Time Capsule working poorly. I don't have the heat issue mentioned in that and other posts, but the device that worked for a month now merely spins it's wheels "preparing" to backup but never quite getting it done. Hopefully something will be done soon.