A script/applet to indicate Time Machine Activity?

Hi,
I have just started using the Time Machine, and believe that it should have an activity indicator somewhere unobtrusively (perhaps in the dead 4 mm to the right of the Spotlight "magnifying glass" icon?). I am using a 500Gb LaCie drive for back-up, connected by a FW800 cable to my MacBook Pro. At times, I'd like to pack it up and go, but must open the System Preferences first, to make sure that the disk is not in use by the Time Machine at the very moment. The indicator should also offer a way of halting the back-up, in case I need to eject the back-up disk, pack up the MBP and go. (I do carry it around to all meetings and such during my work-day!)
I have posted a similarly-worded suggestion in Apple's feedback site. Until they do implement such a thing, does anyone know of an existing script or applet (or can write one) that would offer this?
Thanks, Tristan

First, it's great you have submitted this suggestion to Apple FeedBack. That is the only real way to get Apple's attention. More people should adopt this approach for suggestions like this.
1. TM backup activity is shown in two places. It's shown by two rotating arrows in the Finder's sidebar to right of the TM backup volume. The second place is the TM Pref panel itself.
2. The TM backup can be stopped by clicking the "x" icon to right of the backup progress bar in the TM Pref panel.
3. If you pack up your MBP (i.e., shut it down) while TM backup is in progress a warning message window will be displayed and you can either quit the backup or let it complete.
4. One could also use Activity Monitor and simply Quit the backupd process - but don't recommend this.
5. I'm unaware of any readily available script or drop-on Applet for doing what you've requested.
The above techniques shouldn't take too much effort on your part prior to packing up your MBP.
Good luck....

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Hi,
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Until you have saved a document at least once, it exists only in memory. When your computer died, your file disappeared.
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Regards,
Barry

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Is there any way to have a script execute whenever the Time Machine service completes a backup, or for that matter, and way to tell when a backup is running or has completed?
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2. Run script on timer that scans the backup folder and looks for new backups
Neither of these seems ideal to mean, so I was hoping someone might have a better idea.
Thoughts?

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Time machine not performing housekeeping - previous days' & weeks' multiple backups remaining

As you can see from this image, time machine stopped cleaning backups from previous days and weeks.
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I gave it a try last night. For the record it is item A4 at the pondini.org site. The result:
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- no change to the list of previous back up entries and the mulitple backups from the last few days were not pruned (that is, the problem perists).
- I looked at the backups using the Time Machine interface and only the ones snce removing the .plst are visible. (All of the prior backups are still visible using the finder interface looking at the mounted virtual disk.)

How do I stop Time Machine from backing up Aperture thumbnails?

Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups, and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
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I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
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xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
However, if I run "xattr" on the Aperture files, the attribute does exist!
During my next time machine backup, the iPhoto files were skipped as I wanted them to be, but the Aperture thumbnails were backed up again
I thought that maybe time machine was looking at the aperture package as an atomic unit, but iPhoto is stored as a package as well, and the attributes worked there on files inside the package.
Does anyone have any idea why time machine is still backing up these files? Is there any way I can get around this?
It seems to me to be an incredible oversight on Apple's part since both tools are Apple. The thumbnails files are very expensive to backup, and they are not necessary for backup since the are easy to rebuild from the original photos which are also backed up.
Thanks,
Ron

Shadow99999 wrote:
Hi,
My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups,
No need to write your own script for that. there are a couple of already made nice GUI tools for this - TimeTracker http://www.charlessoft.com/ and BackupLoupe http://soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/
and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
I decided to try and stop Time Machine from backing up these files, and there seems to be no way of doing so (without telling Time Machine to skip backing up my entire Aperture project which I don't want to do). In Finder, you can do a "show package contents", but the Time Machine GUI doesn't allow this.
I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
I don't have aperture but I think most people exclude the whole thing from TM backups and back it up separately. but if you want to exclude a subfolder in a package that's easy too. just select the package in finder, control-click on it and select "show package contents". in the resulting finder window drill to the folder you want to exclude and drag it to the TM exclusion list in TM system preferences->options.
I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
xattr -w com.apple.metadata:comapple_backupexcludeItem com.apple.backupd <filename>
I was not aware of this method for excluding stuff from TM backups. could you provide a link to where you found this?
I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
This command returned the iPhoto files, but did not return the Aperture files.
that's because Spotlight never looks inside packages unless you start a search inside a package directly. iphoto seems to be the only exception. I don't know how it's done.

Initial Time Machine Backup never ends

Hi all folks,
I try to backup my PB12 Disc (120 GB) to a external 500 GB Disc, connected via FW400, but the backup never ends, I think.
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Where can I get some detail information, a log file, about the Time Machine activity from.
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Lutz

Hi all folks,
the initial Backup ends after 2 days (nice to to see, :-(),
but on the boot volume I can go the time walk only.
I split my disc into two partitions, sorry.
Bye, Lutz
p.s.
With CCC I spend 4-6 hours to back up my disks only (100GB).

Time Machine & sleep computer settings

Is it OK to have time machine active and set my computer to sleep after 2 or 3 hours?
Will time machine work when the computer is not asleep, that is will it continue to back up when it is sleeping too?
Is it advisable to set my energy settings to never for computer sleep and just have my display sleeping in order to let TM backup hourly?
Thanks for the advice,
John

growe785 wrote:
Does the Time Machine App. have settings so I can program it to back up when I want it to?
Just on or off.
Does it have a manual option?
If you keep it off you can turn it back on and initiate a +Backup Now+ command.
There is a non-Apple editor:
[http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor]

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I have been using a Western Digital 1 TB external HD (My Book For Mac) to backup my data today for the first time, using their SmartWare software. Everything went smoothly, I backed up 91 GB of data in 2-3 hours.
At the same time, I have also Time Machine activated, which started backing up my files a while ago, but it is crawling at 8 MB per minute. A quick calculation tells me it will take 180 hours to back up 90 GB (?).
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2. If I just ran TimeMachine, why is it so slow? I use a USB 2.0 connection that worked fine for the My Book's own software.
Thanks for your help!

You should first repartition and format the drive. Most likely it is setup for use on Windows. Try this:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
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3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
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6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Do not use the WD software. If it's you wish to create a bootable backup of your drive as well as keep a TM backup, then you should create two partitions on the drive. One for your non-TM backup and one for TM. For the bootable backup use third-party software such as SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner, or SilverKeeper - Download at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Note that many WD drive systems cannot be used for bootable backups. You can find information related to this at the WD web site.

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I have been experiencing a problem since starting Time Machine. The system becomes very slow to come out of sleep mode (20-30 seconds). Every application becomes slow, but the slowest of these seems are the applications that have anything to do with the drives (mounting DVD, system preferences, Time Machine, Activity Monitor, Disk Utility, Finder).
I have tried connecting the external drive (Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 500GB) via both Firewire 400 and USB, but neither connection method solves the problem. I have used Disk Utility to verify both drives, repair both drives and repair permissions of both drives, but nothing has helped.
The slow response can be corrected by restarting the system, but the problem comes back and gets progressively worse the longer that the Time Machine is allowed to run.
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Let it run, is what I have to say. Time Machine works well with some external hard drives, and poorly with others. I suggest either getting a new external hard drive (which I personally am too cheap to do), or just do time machine back ups at night when I'm asleep. It would save the frustration of slow back up time and still get the job done. Also, you might want to check your time machine preferences. There could be some settings that you could change to help out.

Why does Time machine not delete old backups

I dont understand Why time machine is not deleting old backups. As it worked first time with the same size backup drive as the drive its backing up, I assumed it would just delete the old backup as needed. Do I need a bigger backup drive?

Roglee wrote:
I just want it to delete the old backup & replace it so i just have a copy. I guess i could just re format the drive each time but that just seems a waste of my time when TM should do this for me!
If this is all you want to do, turn off Time Machine, download SuperDuper! and use it for free. This will clone whatever drive you want and the free trial will erase your back up drive each time. I can't remember if it will let you choose what to back up or if it wants the entire drive. Also, I'm not sure if the Scheduler works with the free trial. Below are some verbiage for SuperDuper!. Looks like if you want Scheduling you will have to purchase a license.
Download Now!
You can download SuperDuper! v2.7.1 right now and back up and clone your drives for free— forever!
Buy Now!
Buy now to unlock scheduling, Smart Update (which saves a lot of time), Sandboxes, scripting and more!
Time Machine will keep making back ups and when it determines it needs space, it will delete older back ups. But it doesn't delete older ones each time it backs up.

A script/applet to indicate Time Machine Activity?

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