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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Jan
7
(2008)
Check your backups…
Filed under: general, work. Tags: backup, frack, time machine.
I just tried to navigate around in my Time Machine backup, only to find that it was woefully out of date. I’d set it to automatically back everything up, and had assumed that it would, you know, automatically back things up.
It hadn’t been doing it.
Since December 5, 2007.
Over a month ago.
And I’d assumed that I had a reliable hourly/daily/weekly/monthly backup.
Except the last month got dropped.
Frack. If you have a backup solution, check it. If you don’t have one, get one. And check it regularly. I’ve turned Time Machine back on, and will let it chew overnight to make sure I get a decent backup. And now I’ve got to figure out how in hell the Time Machine switch got thrown to “OFF” in the first place. I sure as frack didn’t do that. Time Machine has been the biggest feature of Leopard for me (or so I thought…)
Update: Just to be clear – I’m not saying there’s something wrong with Time Machine, or that there’s some nasty bug that borked things. All I’m saying is “periodically verify that your backup system is functioning as you expect it” – nothing more, nothing less…
I think it flips itself off when you disconnect your drive. But it should stay connected when you re-attach. Good warning. Checking now.
This happened to me as well. I noticed it about two weeks ago, and it had tripped about three weeks earlier it seems. I have no idea why, but thought it was just something I did accidentally … probably not though, looking at your post. This scares me.
I leave the drive connected – not sure what happened. It might have been related to the switch from the quad G5 to the octo Intel (using the same drive for backup) but I could swear that it was working after the switch. In the pref. pane, I tried selecting the drive again, and it blew the old stuff away and started from scratch. Doh. I let it run overnight – all 120GB of data. And I’ll be keeping an eye on it from now on…
I second the hypothosis that switching machines borked it up. I switched my main work stuff from an older PowerBook G4 to a PowerMac G5 (via cloning the drive over from the lappy to the desktop) and just moved the backup drive (connected via USB2). Time Machine didn’t appear to have run. Although I got a warning after 10 days I believe. All I did was turn Time Machine off and on again and everything resumed where it left off. Only a few GB of data, not the whole backup. Since you switched from a PPC to Intel platform, perhaps it got wonkier still?