Mac Backups - Simple, but not so reliable

Apple's latest operating system includes a program called Time Machine, which is supposed to make backups simple. All you have to do is hook up an external drive and and Time Machine will start making hourly backups.  If you accidentally delete a file and empty the trash, no problem.  Just open up Time Machine and 'go back in time' to find the file before you destroyed it.

Time Machine is a great idea because most people find backing up too hard, and that's why they don't do it.  Apple makes it so easy that there really isn't much to think about.  One thing many people did think about was whether it would really work in an extreme emergency, such has having to restore all the data on a computer hard drive.

Which brings me to main story.

As you may recall from a recent blog post, I had to send my MacBook Air in to be fixed.  The damage was mostly cosmetic to one lid of the laptop, caused when I dropped the backpack it was in.  The computer worked, but I decided to bite the bullet and get it repaired.  Apple advised me to do a backup, just in case the damage turned out to be so bad that they'd have to replace the hard drive.

A few months ago I had purchased Apple's 'revolutionary backup device' called Time Capsule, which is basically a wireless router with a large hard drive built in. The idea is that laptop users will not want to keep plugging their computer up to an external drive just to do backups.  And this, of course, is why I bought a Time Capsule device.  So, when Apple advised me to do a backup of my laptop I didn't really have to do anything other than make sure that the laptop had done a backup on the day that I packed up to send it to Apple. I was good to go.

Or so I thought.

When I finally got the computer back from the repair center in Houston (after DHL sent it on a weeklong rambling journey around the country), I found a note telling me that Apple had to replace the hard drive.  When I booted it up it asked me what language I wanted to use. This is the first question you get when you buy a brand new computer, so I knew that—indeed—my data was not on this computer.  But, no worries because I had done the backup before I sent it in.

After I picked my language and answered a few preliminary questions, I pointed the computer at the Time Capsule and said 'yes, I would like to restore all the information from the prior backup.'  The computer started whirring and buzzing and informed me that it would be several hours before it accomplished its task and so I went about my business.

When I checked back a few hours later the computer had finished, and was now presenting the login screen.  I noticed that the icon for my name was different than it had been when I sent it in, but that didn't seem like a big deal.  I logged in, looked around I saw a lot of familiar files—but something didn't seem right.  First, my hard drive only had about 6 GBs of free space when I sent it in.  This hard drive had 31 GBs free.

Not a good sign.

Apparently, the computer had restored only to a point in April of 2008 which was months behind the June date that was my last backup. Why did this happen?  I don't know, and neither did the Apple support representative that I talked to on the phone.  He passed me on to a "Time Machine Specialist" who guided me around a bit.   I discovered that could use Time Machine to "go back in time" and see there was, in fact, a backup on the date that I sent the laptop in.  So we concluded that somehow the restore didn't work properly.  The Apple guy told me to reinstall the operating system and see if it worked better the second time around.

It did not work any better and I wound up with the same restore point of April 2008, which I guess proves the point that time travel is possible but not very reliable.  I thought about calling the Apple folks back, but I knew that they probably wouldn't have any easy solutions, only complicated and time consuming ones.  I decided to take my lumps and avoid further frustration.  I reinstalled the operating system again and just start from scratch.  Fortunately, I didn't have any important data on my laptop (I keep that on my desktop and back that up to 'the cloud').

After I reinstalled the operating system, all the applications I needed (which took about a day), I let the laptop start a new wireless backup to Time Capsule.  And guess what?  That's not working too well now either.  I'll probably have to reboot the Time Capsule machine and maybe even call Apple for assistance.  But I won't call until next week because Apple's kind of busy right now with the whole iPhone iPocalypse.

I bought Time Capsule because Apple promised that it'd be easy to do wireless backups, which it was.  But then I found out the hard way that, it wasn't reliable. And now it's not even easy.

Sigh.

Comments

[dhlexecvp]

looks like apple falsely advertised the quality of time capsule drives:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=445606

[rcs]

Personally I like SuperDuper! for backups - it essentially clones the drive. You don't get the ability to traverse the filesystem at various points in the past but you do get a bootable copy of whatever was there when you ran the backup. I like this approach because the historical data's not much use to me (when it is I use a version-control system.)

[Robin Capper]

If a backup is not reliable, surely it's not a backup?

[Lorra]

Hi ,

Thanks for posting update on new tech.

I'm agree with the " Robin " .

So one can make assure before they are moving forward ...
Thanks .

With best wishes ,

Lorra.