Time Capsule

Trials and time machine

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.

Starting Time Capsule with only part of the disk

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

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.

Trading Time Capsules

Here's a quick random thought. As has been pointed out on some other blogs one of the shortcomings of the Time Capsule is that it only protects against some kinds of needs for data recovery. One could add a little bit more protection without sacrificing the convenience by swapping time capsule's with one's neighbor and having your backups live at their house and vice versa. This only works for people in houses close enough for it to happen and doesn't protect against all ills like a flood wiping out the neighborhood but would likely provide some protection against a house fire... of course the resulting physical insecurity of all your data means you have to really trust your neighbor.

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