wiredfool

Time Machine is great when it works. I had the chance to do a restore from an existing backup today, and had the original drive not been working, I would have been somewhat out of luck.

First, when importing using the migration assistant, the backup was not found. It just wasn’t there even when the network share that contained the sparse image was mounted.

Second, and likely related was that when I attempted to mount the image in the finder, I got an error that there we’re no valid filesystems on the image. This was a highly distressing thing to google, since most of the advice was to make a new backup. (and the pages without that advice are mainly q/a spam. Really bad search results. Thankfully there’s a new chrome extension for that.). I was pretty hopeful, since the original machine could access and continue to update the time machine backup. It turns out that the image opened properly once I copied it to the local drive and mounted it from there. I’m thankful for gigabit networking.

Finally, and most disturbing, there are missing files. These are files that should have been backed up, as they are the original images imported into iphoto. The databases that reference them were backed up properly, as were the thumbnails. Getting them to backup was a matter of touching the directories from a terminal window, then running a new incremental backup.

This does not fill me with confidence that Time Machine will be there when I need it.