Every so often we like to call your attention to some cool Mac-related articles, even if we didn’t write them. In this case, the articles cover a couple of ways to explore your Time Machine backups, and both of them are from the folks over at TidBITS. The first, “Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively”, tells you how to use a modified version of GrandPerspective to see which files are hogging space in your Time Machine backups. If any of these are files that don’t need to be backed up, you can exclude them from your Time Machine backups to make additional room for the files you do want to preserve.
The second explores a new command-line utility called tms, which is coincidentally enough written by Robert Pointon, who is also the author of the fseventer program that we reviewed previously. That article is called “Time Machine Exposed!” and it explains how you can use tms to get much more information about your Time Machine backups than has hitherto been available.
Now, we are not usually a big fan of command-line hacks here in the CrabApple Forest - if we’d wanted to use the command line we’d have stuck with MS-DOS! Mac users (moreso than, say, Linux users) seem to appreciate the value of a good Graphical User interface (GUI). So we are sort of hoping that either Mr. Pointon or someone else will write a GUI “front end” for tms sooner or later. But in the meantime, those of you who are into doing things from the command line, along with those who simply want to be able to delve into your Time Machine backups and find out “what’s in there”, will surely appreciate the information contained in the above-mentioned two articles.
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photo credit: mac_vegetarianWhen Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) first came out, one of the greatest new features - and, unfortunately, one of the most frustrating for some users - was Time Machine. Time Machine is probably one of the best pieces of backup software ever written, in that it makes it absurdly easy to retrieve previous versions of accidentally (or purposely) erased or damaged files. But the only problem is that for many users, it has only consistently worked well if you were willing to dedicate a hard drive (or at least a partition) to Time Machine.
Some users have other storage sitting out on their local networks (known as Network-Attached Storage, or NAS), and wondered why they couldn’t use that for their time machine backups. The funny part is that shortly after Time Machine first appeared, a company called Xiotios Software came out with a small program called iTimeMachine which had only one purpose - it enabled the use of AirDisks and Network Disks in Time Machine.
And it worked, until Apple came out with an incremental upgrade to Leopard, which promptly broke the ability to use external disks for backups for many users. Another upgrade, and some users have reported that they can use external drives, while other still cannot.
We think that what iTimeMachine does is the equivalent of opening a terminal window and entering this:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
… which is another method that some folks have used to allow Time Machine to access networked drives. But this alone doesn’t seem to be sufficient in some cases. Today, Mac OS X Hints published an article describing a three-step process to create a Time Machine backup on a network-attached storage (NAS) unit. 
photo credit: Kai HendryUnfortunately, it comes a bit too late for us - earlier this week we bit the bullet and dedicated an external drive to Time Machine, rather than making further attempts to save Time Machine backups to a drive connected to our “Unslung” Linksys NSLU2, which would probably have worked had we had the above information available.
Our “Crabapple of the Week” gets tossed at Apple, for not making Time Machine work well with network-attached storage, or even their own AirDisks, in the first place, and for not yet fully supporting them even as I write this. Of course, those hard cider drinkin’ boys will have already run down to the Apple store to buy a Time Capsule, but for those of us not ready to open our wallets every time Apple comes out with some new (and, dare we say, sometimes overpriced) gadget, information on how to make Time Machine use our existing devices is much appreciated. And another Crabapple goes to Apple for giving out questionable information (this is a quote from Wikipedia’s page on Time Machine):
….. According to Apple, it can only be backed up to network drives if they are being hosted by another computer running Leopard (including Leopard Server). Further, the volume needs to be formatted with the HFS Plus file system, with journaling enabled. External hard drives typically are pre-formatted with the FAT32 filesystem. To use Time Machine, the hard drive must first be formatted, which erases all data. The hard drive will not require formatting if it is already using the HFS filesystem.
Except that for a period of time after Leopard was released, we were making successful Time Machine backups to a drive attached to the aforementioned Linksys NSLU2, which runs a version of Linux, not Leopard. Oh, and the drives were formatted using EXT3 (the format used by the NSLU2) and we did not reformat them, and Time Machine did not erase any data on the drive. So, if the above information from Apple (as reported in Wikipedia) is true now (and we do not believe that the above is entirely true), it’s because Apple changed something during a recent Leopard upgrade. Would Apple deliberately try to make users think they have to purchase a Time Capsule, or at least use a dedicated external drive, even if that’s not strictly true? We won’t speculate further on Apple’s possible motives for spreading questionable information, but we do wish they would just go ahead and fix Time Machine to play nicely with whatever external storage the user may have available.
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Those of you that have upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard have probably discovered Time Machine. Time Machine is not without its frustrations when you are trying to set it up, but it is hands down one of the best backup systems out there for the typical user. The ability to literally reach back in time and grab a file that was accidentally deleted, or changed in an undesirable manner, is something you don’t fully appreciate until you have used it a few times. It’s really too bad that it doesn’t work as well as it should under certain circumstances (such as when saving to some types of external drives) but we suspect that Apple is working on the problems, and there are supposed to be fixes for Time Machine in the next Leopard update.
One of the frustrating things about Time Machine is it that it makes a new backup once an hour, and there is no way provided to change that timing. As you may imagine, people have various reasons for wanting to adjust that schedule, and fortunately there are two different pieces of free software that will let you do that. Pick one (and only one) and let it modify Time Machine’s behavior to your liking.
The first one we’ll talk about is TimeMachineEditor, which lets you change the default one-hour backup interval of Time Machine. According to the author’s site, you can change the interval or decide to make a backup once a day, once a week or once a month.
The site also describes how it works:
TimeMachineEditor merely updates a system configuration file to change the Time Machine scheduling.
Nothing is installed in your system and you can easily revert back to the default settings (using the ‘Show Default Settings’ menu item from the ‘Settings’ menu).
Once you have changed the scheduling, you can still use the Time Machine preference pane from “System Preferences” as you did before. However the next backup date in the Time Machine preference pane may not be correct, this is just the user interface not being aware of the new scheduling and can be ignored without risk.
The above screenshot shows that it is possible for the user to select an interval. There are more screenshots showing other modes of operation on the author’s web site, so have a look.
The other alternative is called TimeMachineScheduler, and it will let you set the backup interval of Time Machine from 1 to 12 hours.
The feature list for TimeMachineScheduler is as follows:
- Set the interval from 1 to 12 hours.
- Run the backup manually or automatically also at startup, login or when the daemon has been loaded.
- Display the status of the daemon, of the backup volume and if the backup is currently running.
- Automount, an option to mount and unmount the backup volume automatically (see known problems).
- Option to hide the backup volume (to take effect a Finder relaunch is required).
You can visit the TimeMachineScheduler web site for more information. Sooner or later we expect Apple to include this functionality in Time Machine itself, eliminating the need for add-ons such as these. Until they do, you can use either of these programs to get Time Machine to backup on your schedule.
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