Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

(This is a G5 running 10.5.6).

One of my Mac's two internal hard drives dropped dead five days ago,
but I had Time Machine keeping track of both of them, so I should be
able to get the backed-up data from the dead drive onto the new
replacement drive that I will shortly install. Right? (Say right.)

Except, I'm not sure how to restore things with Time Machine, since I
never did it before, and I was hoping somebody here can answer a
question I have before I try it.

I have to go back five days in Time Machine to see the last backup of
the dead drive, and meanwhile I have five days of additional changes
to the other drive.

If I go back five days in Time Machine to retrieve the dead drive's
data, and I tell TM to Restore it to a replacement drive, will TM
restore BOTH drives to the way they were five days ago? I don't want
that, I want TM to leave the good drive current. Can I highlight ONLY
the 1-gig's backup folder, and tell TM to restore it to the new drive,
and it will do that and leave the other drive alone?

Tom
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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Bruce Johnson]

On Sep 4, 2009, at 12:12 AM, Tom wrote:

>
> (This is a G5 running 10.5.6).
>

> If I go back five days in Time Machine to retrieve the dead drive's
> data, and I tell TM to Restore it to a replacement drive, will TM
> restore BOTH drives to the way they were five days ago? I don't want
> that, I want TM to leave the good drive current. Can I highlight ONLY
> the 1-gig's backup folder, and tell TM to restore it to the new drive,
> and it will do that and leave the other drive alone?

How it works is this: when you install the new drive, you then install  
OS X from your 10.5 disk. After the OS is installed, the setup asks  
you if you want to import your data from another mac or disk. So long  
as the time machine volume is online, it will restore the data that  
was on that drive...it will not overwrite newer information on the  
other disk.



-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs



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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

Thanks Bruce. And since I've decided to replace the other drive too,
as a precaution (they're both 5 years old), I guess I'll do that
twice, once with each drive.

Then I'll be back to where I was originally, before the drive failure,
only with new drives instead of old ones.

Tom
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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[John Martz]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 12:12 PM, Tom wrote:
> And since I've decided to replace the other drive too,
> as a precaution (they're both 5 years old), I guess I'll do that
> twice, once with each drive.

There are always lot of unknowns in trying to predict drive failure.
If the drive has been heavily used constantly throughout those 5 years
then it's probably a good idea. But if it were me, I wouldn't
necessarily rush right out to a big box store and pay whatever the
going rate was for a replacement drive. Especially if you're already
routinely backing up this drive.

You can save some money by looking around and waiting for a good
buying opportunity. Of course, none of that matters if the potential
price saving doesn't matter to you. Tastes vary on this. I was just
guessing that if you're maintaining an older Mac then perhaps you
might also be price sensitive.

Either way, you'll potentially be surprised at the improvement in
performance using a drive with the latest technology might buy you.
Things have changed noticeably even within the last 2 years.

-irrational john

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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Bruce Johnson]

On Sep 4, 2009, at 9:12 AM, Tom wrote:

>
> Thanks Bruce. And since I've decided to replace the other drive too,
> as a precaution (they're both 5 years old), I guess I'll do that
> twice, once with each drive.

Were each of them boot drives or was one a data drive?

>
> Then I'll be back to where I was originally, before the drive failure,
> only with new drives instead of old ones.



Yep. This worked like a charm for a professor here who came to me  
worried about his drive which was showing signs of failing. Told him  
to right away get an external drive and run TM. Apple replaced the  
original hard drive (it's still under warrantee) and he put it in ,  
ran the setup and was back, good as new in about an hour. He thinks TM  
is the greatest now...

-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs



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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

Come to think of it, Bruce, both drives, the dead one and the one
still running, have (had) bootable 10.5s on them. Which means that
when Time Machine restores the second drive, it will bring in another
OS on top of the freshly installed one. I wonder if that will be a
problem.

Will the two OSs on the same drive fight with each other, or is TM
smart enough to combine them, or eliminate one?

John, thanks for the advice on buying drives, but I'm too lazy right
now to hunt around for hot deals on new ones, and OWC has always been
a reliable company, so I just up and ordered up two of these 1-TB ones
from them: . There is a cheaper version of
the same drive offered there ($87 vs. $139, see ), but you get what you pay for and this model has a 5 year
warranty and they brag about a million hours and more before it
croaks. So I splurged a little, and with 2-day delivery I ought to be
back in business pretty soon (unless I get all tangled up in Time
Machine for some reason. . . .).

The drive that died, by the way, was a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda, which
was in this used G5 (dual 2.0) when I bought it off eBay. No telling
how much use it had before I got it, but since the owner was a video
editor using Final Cut Pro, I suspect it was a lot.

Tom
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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Bruce Johnson]

On Sep 4, 2009, at 12:30 PM, Tom wrote:

> Come to think of it, Bruce, both drives, the dead one and the one
> still running, have (had) bootable 10.5s on them. Which means that
> when Time Machine restores the second drive, it will bring in another
> OS on top of the freshly installed one. I wonder if that will be a
> problem.


Time Machine is much smarter than that. It will not restore anything  
newer than what it has in it's database. Moreover, even if it did, if  
it's up-to-date, it won't make a difference, because it's just  
replacing one file with the duplicate.

Seriously...you're overthinking the problem...it's a LOT simpler than  
you think it is.

-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs



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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[John Martz]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Tom wrote:
> ... OWC has always been
> a reliable company, so I just up and ordered up two of these 1-TB ones
> from them: . There is a cheaper version of
> the same drive offered there ($87 vs. $139, see  mjm49f>), but ç and this model has a 5 year
> warranty and they brag about a million hours and more before it
> croaks.

The Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 looks like it is an "enterprise" version
of their mainstream 7K1000.B. I'm not well informed on all the
potential differences so perhaps others will jump in here. But the
main differences I could see were:

- a 32MB cache instead of 16MB
- a failure rate of 1 in 10**15 versus 1 in 10**14
- the 5 year warranty versus just the 3 year for the 7K1000.B

I think the drives you bought are claimed to be better for use in a
RAID array. As I say, I have no idea how much of a difference they may
make versus the lower cost more general purpose 7K1000.B.

I have two of the 7K1000.B 1TB drives. The last one I got for $65 from
newegg.com as an OEM drive (seems the most frequent way drives are
sold these days). There's also a $10 rebate for it so if I can get off
my butt and submit it the net price would be closer to $56.

IMO "you get what you pay for" is often as much a hopeful prayer for
the future as a reliable rule of thumb. I also think that part of what
you are paying extra for are intangibles such as confidence in a
particular retailer. Only the buyer can judge how important that is to
them.

In the end, the important thing is that you be happy with your
purchase and it sounds as though you are, so 'nuff said.

What do you plan to do with the nominally still working 5 year old
drive you'll be replacing with one of the new E7K1000s? If it were me,
I'd find some other way to try to continue to get some use out of it.
(Of course, I'd also want to run the manufacturer's diagnostic
software on it to get an idea of how failure prone it might be.)

BTW, as long as that drive is still functioning you could also just
copy/clone it directly to the replacement drive rather than restore it
from Time Machine. Since your Mac is running Leopard you should just
be able to use Disk Utility to copy/clone the non-failed drive to one
of the new Hitachi's provided you can have all three drives mounted at
the same time. That is, if you can temporarily mount 3 drives
internally in your G5 or temporarily attach the new one via an
external USB/Firewire enclosure.

Just because you have a Time Machine backup doesn't mean you must use
it ... unless that's what you really want to do. :-)

-irrational john

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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

Thanks again Bruce. When I get the new drives in a day or two I'll
report my experience with Time Machine here, in case other people are
wondering how well it works.

Hey, you're not so irrational as you claim to be, John. That's a good
idea, cloning the old working drive to a new drive with Disk Utility.
How 'bout this plan, then: I put the first of the new drives in the G5
alongside the old drive that's still working, and clone the old to the
new. Then I toss the old drive and put in the second new one, install
OS 10.5 on it, and let Time Machine restore the dead drive's data to
that one.

Then I'm back where I started before the trouble began, except now I
have all new drives, and maybe millions of hours before the next
crisis. . . maybe. . . I hope.

I suppose I could stick the old working drive into an external
enclosure and keep on using it, if such can be had cheaply somewhere.

Talking about the features of these two new Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000
drives I just bought from OWC, I notice that Hitachi also claims that
this more expensive model works well when it's mounted close to
another drive (see  again). It says there
that two drives running close to each  other, both vibrating slightly
as drives do, can jiggle each other into derangement eventually, or
some such thing, and these Deskstar E7K1000s are made to resist that.
Or something. This G5 does mount its drives right tight together, one
close on top of the other one, so maybe that's a useful feature to
have. Heck, I want to feel like I got something great for the extra
money. I guess the bigger cache size and the longer warranty are
worthwhile, too, and Hitachi does brag about the longevity of this
drive, while it is conspicuously silent about the lifespan of the
cheaper one, as well as not being willing to warranty it for as long.
I'm willing to pay a little extra not to have to go through this dead
drive hassle again anytime soon. Let a few million hours go by first,
I say.

Tom
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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[iJohn]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Tom wrote:
> How 'bout this plan, then: I put the first of the new drives in the G5
> alongside the old drive that's still working, and clone the old to the
> Then I toss the old drive and put in the second new one, install
> OS 10.5 on it, and let Time Machine restore the dead drive's data to
> that one.

It sounds as though you intend to install OS X 10.5 on both of your
drives so that both of them are bootable. Any particular reason why?
Is this a common way to go in the Mac world?

> I suppose I could stick the old working drive into an external
> enclosure and keep on using it, if such can be had cheaply somewhere.

Depends on what you mean by "cheaply". I think they run between $20 to
$30, although you can of course always pay more. Here's a link to
(some of) what's over at newegg just FYIW: http://tinyurl.com/mkulqg

If it were me, one of the things I'd consider is how big the old drive
is. And as I said I'd run the manufacturer's diagnostics on it ... and
possible also the exerciser in the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test software
... to try to get an idea how reliable it still was. But you'd need an
Intel system to run those tools. I don't think the drive manufacturers
offer diagnostic software that runs on a Power PC platform.

How big is your "not dead yet" 5 year old drive?

-irrational john

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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

John, the not-yet-dead drive in this Mac is a 500-gigger. Big enough,
I suppose, to be useful in an external enclosure for archiving
something. Or something.

Hey, I just dropped by the Apple website to see if I could pick up any
pointers on using Time Machine, and it appears that one does not
actually have to install Leopard on a new hard drive first in order to
summon up a complete backup of a dead drive (including its OS) from
Time Machine. Here is the webpage, and the tip is #14 on the FAQ list:


It says there that you need only insert a Leopard installer disk and
boot the Mac from it, and then invoke a utility on that disk called
"Restore from Backups" to prompt Time Machine to call up a complete
restore of a drive.

So, with two drives backed up in Time Machine, I should be able to
boot from the OS installer disk twice, and each time restore the
contents of an old drive to its new replacement drive.

Tom
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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[iJohn]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 2:19 AM, Tom wrote:
> So, with two drives backed up in Time Machine, I should be able to
> boot from the OS installer disk twice, and each time restore the
> contents of an old drive to its new replacement drive.

Yes, you should not need to install OS X to a drive just to be able to
restore the data on it from Time Machine.

Also, while I haven't done it so I can't say for sure, I don't think
you'd have to boot from the install disc twice. You should only need
to boot from the install DVD once and then just use the “Restore
System From Backup…” utility to restore first one disk and then the
other.

Of course, before you began this entire process you'd want to make
sure you have a current back up of your "not dead yet" drive you're
going to replace. Just to make sure your backup contains a complete
copy of that drive.

I see there are also notes about immediately/temporarily turning off
Time Machine backup after the restore to postpone Time Machine doing a
complete (re)backup of both your drives. Not sure what the best way to
approach that aspect of the process is. I guess at a minimum you'd
want to make sure your system is working the way you expect/want
before you let Time Machine overwrite your existing backup by backing
up the drives you just restored.

How does your G5 access your Time Machine backup? (Just curious.)

-irrational john

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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

Yes, if I can work Time Machine from the Leopard installer disk,
you're right, I should be able to restore to both new drives in a
single step. What I would do is just install the two new, empty
drives, then fire up Time Machine from the installer disk, and tell TM
to restore first one disk and then the other. If that's all there is
to it, this should be simple.

I paid for two-day shipping from OWC, so the drives might show up
today. If not, the Labor Day holiday, in which no one labors,
including FedEx I presume, will delay their delivery for a few more
days, drat it. Whenever they do show up, I'll report here how well the
restoration project goes.

I  have a 1 TB external drive plugged into the firewire slot on the
front of the G5, and that's the one that Time Machine backs up to.

Your suggestion that the currently working drive in the G5 be backed
up to another storage device before trying any of this Time Machine
stuff makes good sense, and I'll do that. Thanks.

Tom
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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Bruce Johnson]

On Sep 5, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Tom wrote:

> Yes, if I can work Time Machine from the Leopard installer disk,
> you're right, I should be able to restore to both new drives in a
> single step. What I would do is just install the two new, empty
> drives, then fire up Time Machine from the installer disk, and tell TM
> to restore first one disk and then the other. If that's all there is
> to it, this should be simple.

That's all there is to it.

-- 
Bruce Johnson

"Wherever you go, there you are" B. Banzai,  PhD


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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Ralph Green]

On Fri, 2009-09-04 at 17:14 -0400, John Martz wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Tom wrote:
> > ... OWC has always been
> > a reliable company, so I just up and ordered up two of these 1-TB ones
> > from them: . There is a cheaper version of
> > the same drive offered there ($87 vs. $139, see  > mjm49f>), but ç and this model has a 5 year
> > warranty and they brag about a million hours and more before it
> > croaks.
> 
> The Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 looks like it is an "enterprise" version
> of their mainstream 7K1000.B. I'm not well informed on all the
> potential differences so perhaps others will jump in here. But the
> main differences I could see were:
> 
Howdy,
  There is a discussion thread in another list I follow that talks about
these drives.  I would suggest you look at:
http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5899-Some-perspective-to-this-DIY-storage-server-mentioned-at-Storagemojo.html

 A Sun storage expert was commenting on an article about building your a
cheap storage array.  He talks about the the enterprise drive you refer
to and compares it to a desktop drive. 



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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

Thanks Ralph. That article is heavy going for a non-techie like me,
but what I seem to get out of it is that these "enterprise" drives
such as the two I bought are built to a higher standard than regular
drives, able to run reliably non-stop 24/7 even while enduring higher
operating temperatures. If so, the extra cash I spent for them I
consider well spent. I was mainly just looking at the extra two years
of warranty protection Hitachi provides for them.

Tom
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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

OK, I got the two new drives today, replaced my dead internal drive
with one of them, and used Time Machine to restore the contents of the
dead drive to the new one. I was successful, but only on the second
try. I didn't do it the right way the first time around, I guess.

The first time I tried to restore the contents of the drive, I did it
through Time Machine's "Star Wars" interface. After booting up the Mac
with the old internal drive that still works, and seeing that the new
drive was on the desktop, I went into Time Machine, located the folder
that contained the contents of the dead drive (named "Internal 1000"),
highlighted it, and hit "Restore." TM then asked where I wanted to put
the data, I chose the new drive, and TM copied all the stuff onto it.

Notice that it said it was "copying" all the "items" from the dead
drive to the new one. In other words, it did not say it was restoring
the drive, like I wanted it to, it said it was copying the data onto
it. I let it go ahead and do it, though, and It took a few hours, and
when it was done, I opened up the new drive's window and saw that all
the data was inside a folder titled "Internal 1000." I opened the
folder and tried to launch a couple of the restored Final Cut Pro
projects, but they would not open. They got stuck on a dialogue box
that said something about "Final Cut Documents folder missing." I had
sort of expected something like that. On the original drive, all the
stuff was  out in the open in the drive's window, it was not inside of
a folder like that. And Final Cut is very fussy about folders.

So, I decided to try the other method of restoring data with Time
Machine. First I erased the new drive, to start over from scratch, and
then I restarted the Mac with the Leopard installer disk, by holding
down the C key.

After the Leopard Installer disk booted up and took control, I used
its Utilities menu to choose Restore with Time Machine (I think that's
what it was called), and this time TM offered more choices. It showed
both "Internal 1000" and Internal "Internal 1000 10.5.6." available to
restore from. I figured the latter was just offering to restore the OS
only, so I chose "Internal 1000," and TM then offered me the whole
list of that drive's backups from the day the it failed on back
several weeks. Naturally I chose the most recent backup and hit
"Restore."

This time TM did not say that it was "copying items," it said it was
Restoring the Disk, which is what I wanted. And sure enough, four
hours later, I was able to open the new hard drive's window, and there
was everything sitting out in the open just like it had been on the
old drive. This time, all the Final Cut video projects opened up just
fine, although in some cases they complained of missing render files,
but all I had to do to fix that was tell Final Cut to render the
videos over again. And all is well! Everything works, so far!

So, I guess there is a wrong way and a right way to restore the
contents of a drive with Time Machine, and of course I picked the
wrong way first.

I have now turned Time Machine off, to prevent it from backing up the
contents of the new drive until I'm sure everything is fine with it,
so I'll go a few days this way and keep testing everything out. So
far, everything seems to be working fine. All my stuff is back, and
Time Machine has proven itself to be a very valuable asset!

After a few days, I'll replace the old boot drive with the other new
hard drive, and use the Leopard disk to restore the contents of that
drive also. Then I'll be right back where I was before the other drive
failed, except I'll be running two brand new hard drives that
shouldn't fail for years, I hope! But I'm going to keep those five
year warranty papers handy, and I'm going to keep Time Machine on the
job!
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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[John Martz]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 10:34 PM, Tom  wrote:
> But I'm going to keep those five
> year warranty papers handy

I've never replaced a drive under warranty so I may have this wrong.
But the impression I got from poking around drive manufacturer web
sites is that they all base the warranty period not on your purchase
date, as you might expect, but rather on the drive's date of
manufacturer. This is determined from the drive's serial number.

If you're curious you can visit Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
support at http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/support/warranty ,
plug in the serial numbers of your new drives, and find out when there
warranty period ends for them.

-irrational john

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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

Thanks John, but in this case it's pretty easy to tell when these
drives were made; they both have July 2009 printed right on them, in
big red letters! (Must be something new?).

Tom
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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[iJohn]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 12:00 AM, Tom  wrote:
> Thanks John, but in this case it's pretty easy to tell when these
> drives were made; they both have July 2009 printed right on them, in
> big red letters! (Must be something new?).

Yes, that works too. :-)

The point I had in the back of my mind was more along the lines of if
you ever did need to do a warranty RMA then Hitachi would start with
your drive's serial number. Being the cynical, less trusting sort, I
like to verify that the date derived from the serial number matches
what's printed on the drive.

No reason at all to think they would not match. I just like to make
sure they do. That's one of the (many) reasons I'm known as ...

-irrational john

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Re: Question about how Time Machine works

[Tom]

This thread will probably end up archived somewhere, so I'll just tie
up the loose end and report how the installation and restoration of
the second disk went, for anyone who may be faced with doing this in
the future.

To continue the above, after the new replacement for the dead drive
ran reliably for a few days, and everything on it worked fine, it was
time to replace the other (still working) drive, just as preventative
medicine, since they were both five years old.

The replacement and restoration of the data on the second drive went,
like the first one, with only minor hitches. As with the first one, I
first replaced the old drive in the Mac with the new one, paying no
attention to any settings on the new drive itself such as master/slave
or "cable select" as I'd had to do with drives in the older Macs.
Apparently with these new SATA drives in G5 Macs or newer, you just
ignore all that stuff and slap 'em in there, just as they come out of
he box, and they work fine.

Then I fired up the Mac using the Leopard installer disk with the C
key held down, and after the disk took control (and it makes you
choose a language, like an ATM machine), I went up to the Utilities
menu and chose Disk Utility and initialized the drive with it, giving
it exactly the same name as the drive it replaced ("Internal 500").
When that was done, I picked "Restore from Backups" from the same
utilities menu, and it then asks you to choose a Time Machine backup
to restore from (my Time Machine is an external 1 TB drive plugged
into the front of the G5).

Once again, the backups for both drives were double-listed in the
Choose window for some reason, once with an OS number and once
without, like this: "Internal 500" and "Internal 500 10.4.11," and
"Internal 1000" and "Internal 1000 10.5.6." Here was the first little
error made by the utility, because both drives had 10.5.6 on them, and
neither one had 10.4.11. No matter, I chose "Internal 500," which was
the original name of the drive being replaced.

Then the installer asked me to choose a disk to restore the data to,
and here the second little glitch appeared, because the newly
initialed drive was not listed in the window. I decided to restart the
Mac to see if it would appear, but Restart was grayed out under the
Apple menu, so I backed up through the Utility's windows (hitting the
"Back" button on each window) until I came to the first one, but
"Restart" was still grayed out. So I went the other way, and repeated
the process of choosing a drive to restore from and to, and the second
time it asked me what drive I wanted to restore to, the new drive
appeared in the list. Glitch fixed, somehow.

I chose the new drive and hit Restore, and four hours later (during
which time a Time Machine window sat on the monitor with "Restoring"
at the top and a progress bar slowly filling up at the bottom) I had a
complete working copy of the original drive, which boots up and runs
exactly like it. And all is well. Pretty soon I'll have Time Machine
make a complete new backup of both drives, and then I'll be back where
was from before the old drive failed.

The two new hard drives run very quietly, and Hitachi thinks they'll
continue to run for at least five years, judging from their warranty,
so I'm sitting pretty at the moment.

Time Machine has proven to me that it is capable of restoring a big
hard drive after a complete failure, and I intend to keep it on the
job from now on, doing its hourly backups. It's a great safety feature
for a guy like me who is too lazy and absentminded to do frequent
backups otherwise.
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