I love Time Machine, even with my earlier problems with the Time Capsule. It’s a great program and has saved me a couple of times already. A product like this has been sorely lacking in the Desktop/Home computer world. But it still has it’s problems. BTW, make sure Leopard is upgraded to 10.5.2, some major security flaws were fixed.

In case you’re a hard core Time Machine nerd and love that cool Galaxy spanning background, maybe you want to make it your screen saver? Just be aware that this won’t work if Aperture is installed.

For those of us who have NAS servers at home, here are directions to make it work with the Netgear ReadyNAS. No clue if these directions work with FreeNAS, but I suspect the key is the defaults unsupported volume preference.

One of Time Machine’s current problems is that it backs up everything, multiple times. In the long run this causes Time Machine (and the computer) to start running much slower. After all it’s got a lot of small files to process! This can be fixed by deleting the Time Machine backup and letting it go again. Or for the much less faint of heart, macosxhints.com has directions to change the band sizes of the sparsebundle file here. After reading those directions, even I’ll just go ahead and delete the backup myself.

Robert Pointon created a command line tool called tms to explore Time Machine Backups in new ways. One of the best features is the ability to see the difference between two different backups. Another feature includes the ability to see how many times a certain file (or application) has been backed up. There is no GUI interface for tms yet, but when it happens this will be a must-use tool.

In cases where huge amounts of data have been changed, Time Machine can take an extremely long time to backup. Systemboy figured out how to create an xml file that allows Time Machine to keep backing up a users data after they’ve logged out. This feature alone is worth a big mention!

Over all Time Machine is a great tool. It’s simple, easy to setup and makes sense for every Mac user in a non-business environment. Down the road Apple will no doubt add more features to it, but until then third parties will cover for them.

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