George? You didn’t see Time Machine’s Preference panel ON slider button? It’s honkin’ huge!

And honkin’ is an understatement

Oh, and thank you, Partners in Grime, for the added tip.

Peace,
Gene

rwahrens says: “Your last save will NOT get caught by the backup, and will not until you log in – say tomorrow afternoon? What if your drive tanks overnight?”

Before you log off, control- or right-click Time Machine’s Dock icon and choose “Back Up Now” to solve your dilemma.

George? You didn’t see Time Machine’s Preference panel ON slider button? It’s honkin’ huge!

My only nitpick is that TM doesn’t do one more incremental backup after a logoff.

That may seem unnecessary, but just think:

You’ve been working for several hours on, say, editing a movie, and with a little work in iPhoto just prior to the movie.

Ok, the first hours will get caught on backup by the regular incremental backups.

BUT – you’re late for dinner, the spouse is hotter than the roast beef, so you log off and go carve the cow – at say 58 minutes after the last incremental backup.

Your last save will NOT get caught by the backup, and will not until you log in – say tomorrow afternoon? What if your drive tanks overnight?

You’re screwed. UNLESS Time Machine did one last check – while all users were logged off – to see if any files were changed since the last incremental backup. If so, it could catch those files, THEN stop all hourly backups, since they wouldn’t be needed till someone logged on.

THAT would make Time Machine truly a major league backup program!

It’s good now, for a 1.0 version, but this concept would make it almost foolproof.

I have to admit that I didn’t see the button in the Time Machine System Preference that you need to click to get Time Machine working until two days after I installed Leopard – and I did wonder (aloud, in front of the family) why my Time Machine wasn’t working. The worst part is – my kids won’t accept my excuse of failing eyesight, and feel that they really should remove the G5 iMac out of my care, because I’m getting senile!! AAAAGH!!!

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact they both run Intel iMacs?

As for booting from the external drive – I created (once I discovered I could do so without destroying everything, and it worked this time – touch wood!) a separate 10GB partition to which I copied the Leopard Install DVD. If I want to restart from my external HD, I restart with the Opt key, select the DVD partition and proceed from there. HTH!

I’ve been using T. M. the past five days, and am pretty happy with it. The one thing that worried me the most, that it might slow down my Mac’s normal operations, isn’t the case, it’s works VERY unobtrusively, I can’t even hear my hard disks working. I agree that the major drawback is that it doesn’t produce a bootable backup, we can only hope that Apple adds that (and also the ability to work over a wireless network) in future versions. Then it would be near-perfect. What I’m concerned about now is watching it closely to learn out how long it takes to fill up my external h. d. or, put differently, how far back in time it is going to be able to reach (weeks? months??). When I know that, then I’ll need to ask myself how far back in time I really need to go, and that will tell me if I do or don’t need to invest in a bigger h. d. All in all, this is hands down the jewel in Leopard’s crown. I’d have been more than willing to pay the price for the whole OS just to get this single application