Time Machine backups to networked drive - TOO slow?

Hi all,
Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of hits when searching for these keywords (I don't have time to read them all), I will post my question here hoping that someone has mercy on my soul... :-)
I read the whole FAQ by Pondini (thanks!) but still need some help...
I have:
1 rMBP (OSX 10.8.4) with a 512Gb SSD and
1 MBP Early 2009 (OSX 10.6.8) with a 500Gb HD with a 2TB data HD attached by USB2
1 MacMini Late 2009 (OSX 10.6.8) with a 320Gb being used as a HomeTheater
that I will like to backup to a 4TB USB3 drive I just bought, attached to the same MacMini (so USB2 speed)
The 4TB drive is partitioned in 3: 1.5Gb for each portable and 1Gb for the Mini (Setup following Pondini's recommendations)
My wifi network is served by an Asus RT-N16 router (802.11n)
First I started the TM Machine of the MacMini and it went fine: Initial backup of bout 240Gb took a couple of hours.
But then I started the backup of the rMBP and the time estimation of the calculated 254Gb was........ 168 DAYS!....
So I stopped it and I am making the initial backup locally (It's almost finished in about 1 hour) and then I will follow Pondini's instructions to convert this "local" TM backup to a "networked" one.
My question is: Do I need to be worried that my intended system will be to slow to be feasible? I mean, I know that incremental backups will be faster...but will my setup be usable?
Best regards and thansk in advance!
Julian

The initial estimate of time remaining can be wildly inaccurate.

Similar Messages

Mountain Lion Time Machine backup to USB drive super slow

I recently upgraded the MacBook Air to Mountain Lion. The time machine backup is SUPER SLOW even when doing it on a USB 3.0 Drive. It currently showing 2 days for 100GB backup. I was able to copy the same 100 GB of files on to the same hard disk in less than 1 hr. This is so slow that i might be better off managing back ups manually or just writing a small script to do it. But before I do so wanted to check if anybody else has the same issues.
Regards
Uddhav
Update:
Turning off the spotlight on the external hard disk helped improve the speed dramatically. Brought it down from 1 GB in 1 hr to almost 1 GB / minute.
System Preferences --> Spotlight
Add the Drive to the exceptions list. It will say this is a time machine disk so except the time machine folder everything else will be added to the exception list. Say Yes and thats it !!!
Now says 19hrs still a lot according to me but much better than 2 days.
Any body has any additional tips /tricks please share !!
Regards
Uddhav

uddhav wrote:
Turning off the spotlight on the external hard disk helped improve the speed dramatically.
That may indicate a damaged index. Keep an eye on subsequent backups -- if they take a long time, and/or show "indexing backup" on the Time Machine preferences panel for very long, you may need to delete it, so OSX can recreate it. See the pink box in #D2 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting for instructions.
It will say this is a time machine disk so except the time machine folder everything else will be added to the exception list.
Is there anything else on the drive (in the same partition)? If so, that's usually not a good idea. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #3 for an explanation.
Now says 19hrs still a lot according to me but much better than 2 days.
Yes, that's quite slow, especially if your Mac supports USB 3.
If it doesn't, it should be running at USB 2 speeds, which for a full backup should be, very roughly, 40-50 GB/hour.
See the rest of #D2 in the Troubleshooting link for other causes of slow backups.

Time machine backup on network drive

i have a netgear router with readyshare usb network drive i have a 2TB external hdd that i use for a central location to view files for both my imac 10.7.5 and multiple pc's windows 7 i currently have a external hdd connected to my imac just for time machine however this is only 320gb not large enough. was wondering if i could somehow make an alias of my current time machine bacup and place it in my network drive so that my backup would use this space too or maybe even make this time machine drive larger? or if i delete the connected time machine drive will the alias still be as is? i understand that i can just create a partition however if i understand the process correctly this would erase my files and the only option would be ExFat format from imac for windows then i would make and extended journal for use with time machine. i am not sure i want to do this because i dont know if i could reformat the disk with the default software still on thie 2TB drive. also i dont know if i could use it with all my pc's and imac. currently i can transfer files to either computer.

I have the exact same problem, but I am not using TM over a network... Only my local Mac Pro w/ a 600gb external drive. I recall back when I first got Leopard that time machine did in fact ask me if I wanted it to delete old backups after the drive filled up. Then one day it randomly decided to not delete old backups anymore... Instead displaying the same error message you get.
Can anyone help? (Besides telling me not to back up certain files, and to do it less often. Those are BS solutions! I want my entire HD backed up every time automatically erasing old backups when necessary. Is that too much to ask for?)

Time machine restore from network drive kernel panic

I had a late 2013 macbook pro 15" retina, I was backing up with time machine to a network drive (western digital my cloud). All of my backups are there and the data looks valid. In April I ended up selling the macbook pro, then recently I bought another one and attempted to restore from the network drive.
I chose the option to restore on boot from network device, it properly detects and lets me browse my previous backups. I choose restore, the restore will run for a few hours and then reboot with a kernel panic.
panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff00184c0ac1): "Unable to find driver for this platform: \"ACPI\".\n"0/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-2422.90.20/iokit/Kernel/IOPlatformExpert.cpp: 1541"
I've tried a few different backups, one from April, one from march...both result in the same error. Any ideas why this would happen?

Time Machine full system restores only work if the backup disk doesn't need drivers separate from Mac OS X to mount. To make a long story short, you CAN'T do a full system restore with the disk your backups are on.

Time Machine and a network drive combined

I figured out how to connect Time Machine with a network drive (like LaCie Mini). It works great, the only thing is, everytime I restart the mac I need to re-connect manually to the server in order TM can run.
I wondered why OS X gives not the option to connect to certain servers AUTOMATICALLY when starting up?
thanks for help

Well,
PLEASE can you tell us how you figured out how to backup to a network drive because Apple tech told me you could not do that!
To your question though, on those LaCie drives, you have to log in with a password, right? On the drives I have used with clients, although the password was filled in for me, we had to press OK every single time to actually connect to the drive... I could not bypass the login procedure on the drive, it had nothing to do with OSX. You might serve yourself well to see if LaCie can offer you a way to connect to the drive automatically?
Although I know nothing about scripts, could you just get a script to run automatically at startup to connect you to that drive?
I'm interested in this topic so please feel free to share what you know and your experience with it. Thanks in advance.
I was also frustrated to find out that I couldn't even back up via Time Machine to a drive connected via USB to my Airport Extreme... I mean come on!

My time machine backup external hard drive has failed. I have a newer external drive already connected to my MAC but can't figure out how to get Time Machine to set up on it?

My time machine backup external hard drive has failed. I have a newer external drive already connected to my MAC but can't figure out how to get Time Machine to set up on it

http://pondini.org/TM/21.html

Can i transfer my time machine backup to another drive?

can i transfer my time machine backup to another drive?

Did you prep the new drive?
Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) 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.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
New drives usually are pre-formatted for Windows, not Macs. WD is generally well known for their poor level of Mac support.

Restoring Time Machine backup to a drive in a "Voyager Dock"

Restoring Time Machine backup to a drive in a "Voyager Dock"
I would like to restore a Time Machine volume to a hard drive not installed in the computer it has backed up.
I have an iMac 24” with a failing drive. It will eventually need to be replaced.
I have my Time Machine back up for this computer in a Voyager Docking station.
I would like to have Time Machine “restore” the iMac’s data to a drive in another Voyager Dock running from a computer other than the iMac involved.
What I hope to do is bring the “restored” drive and the iMac to my Mac service provider and just have them swap the old drive for the new.
How do I get Time Machine to do this?

So, You're saying I can do this from a different computer with its own Time Machine?
In other words, I have my Time Machinedrive from the dead iMac and a fresh, formatted drive both hooked up to an unrelated computer with its own Time Machine.
If I enter Time Machine on that computer won't it show me the data it backs up for that computer only?
Will Time Machine know that there are two Time Machine backups (the one from the iMac and the one from the new host machine), and allow me to select the one from the iMac?

Make Time Machine backup to specific drive only on specific network?

I have an old macbook pro 2007 that I use for time machine backups over the local network. It works perfectly; however, my main computer is also a macbook pro (2013) I can only get backups to the MBP 2007 via a specified IP Address (10.0.1.232). The problem is, they're are 4 different networks I regularly connect to, and if I am on the wrong network, the backup will still be attempted. Sometimes, I get an authentication error, sometimes I get a disk not found error, and sometimes it successfully backs up, which I do not want unless I am on the correct network.
How can I make it only backup to 10.0.1.232 when on the appropriate network?
I understand that this is not a problem with time capsules, as it bases it off of more than the ip address, i cannot do this with my mbp as far as I am aware. If anyone knows how to change this, that could be an alternative solution.

Benny B wrote:
Anyone want to help dumb this down for me? I got a new larger hard drive and want to move my old Time Machine drive over to the new one. I erased the new one using Disk Utility and followed the FAQ to do the Restore to move the old drive. I get a "Could not validate source - Bad file descriptor" error and it doesn't go further.
You need to do a +*Repair Disk+* (not permissions) on the old drive. If DU repairs some error(s) but not all, run it again (and again) until it either repairs them all or can't fix any more. If it can't fix them all, post back for options.
I'm already switched over to 10.6.1 - does that have something to do with it? If I use the Finder to move it over do I just take all the folders and move them over, rename the drive and fire up TM?
No, don't try that until you get the old backups repaired. The Finder won't be able to copy them, either. And you must copy the entire Backups.backupdb folder.
Oh, and please update your profile ... 10.4.10?

Time Machine Backup to network shared drive.

Hi All,
I'm a relatively new Mac user (only had my MacBook Air (2010) since about Oct/Nov. I've been trying to get Time machine up and running so that it backs up to a shared 2TB drive on my wife's Windows Desktop Computer, but have only been partially successful.
Theese are the instructions I used: http://safalra.com/other/time-machine-network-drive/
Everything went super smooth and I was rewarded with a Time Machine Backup of about 94GB in progress when I went to sleep last night. However, when I woke up this morning I saw the error that something went wrong (same error I always see) and that I should try again later.
I restarted the backup on the Time Machine to see a backup progress of "43K of 32GB". It seems to be staying right there though. This seems to happen every time I try this. Has anyone had any success doing a Time Machine backup to a Windows Network drive?

The most recent error was along the lines of C3: ". . . an error occurred while copying files to the backup volume".
"The backup was not performed because an error occurred while copying files to the backup disk. The problem may be temporary. Try again later to back up. if the problem persists, use Disk Utility to repair your backup disk.:
Also, here's the 4 most recent log entries I have from Time Machine Buddy. They go newest (top) to oldest (bottom).
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/500GB-Time Miachine/Backups.backupdb
Error parsing SystemMigration.log to determine source volume of system migration.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 42.93 GB requested (including padding), 384.42 GB available
Stopping backup.
Error: (-41) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/ericmontgomery/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Album Artwork/Download/677910B9A6CE02EF/00/12/11/677910B9A6CE02EF-8FE79D8543C93BC0.it c2 to /Volumes/500GB-Time Miachine/Backups.backupdb/EricsMBA/2011-02-05-081809.inProgress/960F3178-23CD-4 B54-A669-4630937E75B9/Macbook Air/Users/ericmontgomery/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Album Artwork/Download/677910B9A6CE02EF/00/12/11
Copied 1202 files (5.2 GB) from volume Macbook Air.
Copy stage failed with error:11
Backup failed with error: 11
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/500GB-Time Miachine/Backups.backupdb
Error parsing SystemMigration.log to determine source volume of system migration.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 42.93 GB requested (including padding), 384.42 GB available
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/500GB-Time Miachine/Backups.backupdb
Error parsing SystemMigration.log to determine source volume of system migration.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 42.93 GB requested (including padding), 399.92 GB available
Stopping backup.
Error: (-41) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/ericmontgomery/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Album Artwork/Download/677910B9A6CE02EF/00/12/11/677910B9A6CE02EF-8FE79D8543C93BC0.it c2 to /Volumes/500GB-Time Miachine/Backups.backupdb/EricsMBA/2011-02-05-081809.inProgress/48A5220A-4A96-4 8A2-A847-39C28D38F253/Macbook Air/Users/ericmontgomery/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Album Artwork/Download/677910B9A6CE02EF/00/12/11
Copied 263 files (5.2 GB) from volume Macbook Air.
Starting standard backup
Attempting to mount network destination using URL: smb://Liz@liz-desktoppc/EricsBackup
Mounted network destination using URL: smb://Liz@liz-desktoppc/EricsBackup
QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
Disk image /Volumes/EricsBackup/EricsMBA_5855caf7dafb.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine
Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb
Error parsing SystemMigration.log to determine source volume of system migration.
No pre-backup thinning needed: 36.19 GB requested (including padding), 1.48 TB available
Stopping backup.
Error: (-41) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/ericmontgomery/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Album Artwork/Download/677910B9A6CE02EF/00/12/11/677910B9A6CE02EF-8FE79D8543C93BC0.it c2 to /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/EricsMBA/2011-02-04-195508.inProgress/F3C62C97-D053-4C D5-8D47-DF87184DF59C/Macbook Air/Users/ericmontgomery/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Album Artwork/Download/677910B9A6CE02EF/00/12/11
Copied 298519 files (1.7 GB) from volume Macbook Air.
Copy stage failed with error:11
Backup failed with error: 11
Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Ejected Time Machine network volume.
Message was edited by: EricMontgomery

Problems when Copying Time Machine Backups to another Drive

MacBook Pro Retina 250 GB SSD (mid 2013) and Mavericks:
I had a 1.2 TB TimeMachine Backup on a 2x3 TB RAID1 Thunderbolt Drive and wanted to continue these on a 1x3 TB MyBook (RAID1 appeared to me not very appropriate for TimeMachine Backups as I have always two redundant external archives for all my data, except system, applications and libraries)
i did this 3 months ago, shifting /copying the Backups from a 1 TB Passport Drive to the 2x3 TB RAID1 Duo. I followed strictly the recommended procedures on formatting the new drive. It took many hours, but there was no problem.
Now, shifting from the 2x3 TB RAID1 Duo to a 1x3 TB Drive took again 7-8 hours, but short of completion, copying the Time Machine directory Backups.backupdp to the new drive, the system said that there are files, unable to convert (???). See two of the messages.
The Backup directory on the new disk is some 40 GB smaller than on the original disk – and grayed out, i.e. unable to open.
Again I followed strictly the instructions for formatting the new drive, as I did earlier. The only difference in between the two actions:
a Mavericks update from 10.9.1 to 10.9.2
a pages, numbers and keynote update, which I deleted after a few tries and I reinstalled Pages9 etc. again The simplified apps were useless for me, as too many of the standard features of iWork 9 - an ergonomic, simplier but almost full alternative to MS Office – are missing.
What could be the problem?
Another message, the one about "unable to convert", I missed the screenshot...

Although the documentation says you can copy Time Machine backups in the Finder, it's very slow and sometimes doesn't work at all.
First, open the Time Machine preference pane and click the Options button. You may have to unlock the settings first by clicking the padlock icon in the lower left corner of the window. Authenticate as an administrator.
Delete the volume you're going to copy from the list of backup destinations. Then turn Time Machine OFF.
Launch Disk Utility, open the built-in help, and search for the term "Duplicate." Follow the instructions. All existing data on the destination volume will be erased. That shouldn't be a problem, because you don't want to mix backup and non-backup data on the same drive anyway.
In the TM preference pane, select the new volume as a backup destination.

I want to use time machine on a network drive

i know in the past Apple holds us hostage to buy their time capsule. With Lion now launched, is there a work around to allow families to buy there own hard drive and use it for multiple macs for time machine?
Im fairly new to Mac, convinced my wife to switch, now here we are held captive to buy a TC when we already have a fantastic 2TB drive we purchased for a fraction of the price of a TC. I dont care about wifi, I just want to save our Mini time machine to our MBP networked drive (or vice versa).
I currently have Lion on the MBP, and Leopard on the Mini. After installing and hating Lion on my MBP, i have not "upgraded" the mini. (although I am currently following the "upgrade back to Leopard" threads)
Thanks for any help or ideas.

In the past Apple was not holding you hostage by requiring you to use a Time Capsule for network Time Machine backups. Search on Google for Time machine NAS OS X (or something like that) You will find a number of drives that were working with SL.
Now, they did change the file protocol in Lion, so some of the NAS servers won't work with Lion, at the moment. So long as it is a decent company that makes the NAS they should be releasing a firmware update to get their NAS working with Lion.
One of the companies that put out a press release was Western Digital. They said they would be working on an updated firmware so that you could use it as a Time Machine drive.
Just look around the interwebs and I am sure you will find several that will work.

Time Machine backup and main drive corrupted. Help! (REWARD OFFERED)

Here's the deal:
I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini both runnign Snow Leopard. I use the Mac Mini as a kind of media center / server, it has a few external drives connected to it. On of these drives (1GB) is dedicated to Time Machine, the Mac Mini (80 GB hard drive) backs up to it directly and the Macbook Pro (500 GB hard drive) does it over the network (Time Machine created a sparsebundle). This has worked well for years now. Occasionally I got the error that Time Machine needed to start a new backup because the old one was corrupt. That happened about 2-3 times a year (did the same thing when I backued up via USB). Now about 2 weeks ago, that error came up and I just let the Macbook Pro on overnight and connected the ethernet cable for faster transfer.
When I woke up, the Macbook Pro didn't respont at all, spinning beachball, no response at all beside mouse movement. I let it do it's thing for another 10 hours (while I was at work) and just held down the power button to power off and restart it. But all I got was the gray-on-gray flashing folder with the question mark in it, that's what you get when the Mac can't find bootable partitions. So I popped in the OSX Snow Leopard install disk, ran disk utility. It saw the hard drive, but no partition (i.e. Machintosh HD) on it. I checked the Time Machine backup and the sparsebundle was 300 GB (the Macbook Pro had 400 GB used, the remaining 100 GB were free). There is no way to restore from an unfinished Time Machine backup...
First thing I did was clone the internal (Macbook Pro) hard drive to a DMG disk image using DiskDrill (the only program I found that could recognize the drive at all, not even DiskWarrior could). I also bought the exact same hard drive model and partitioned it like the cloned the corrupted hard drive to the new one using ddrescue (a command line tool that doesn't quit upon i/o errors but proceeds and tries to recover as much as it can). It copied everything except 65 kilobytes, the corrupted drive seemed to be physically damaged in a bunch of sectors relatively at the beginning of the disk. Since I had now an exact copy on a fresh, healthy drive, I went crazy trying out Disk Warrior (didn't recognize the drive at all), data rescue, testdisc, p a Windows isk, etc. Only R-Studio (on windows) showed the EFI and Macintosh HD partitions on there, they started and ended on the same sectors on the corrupted drive and its clone. After some research, I figured that the partition table was corrupt so I reformated the clone disk using the OSX Snow Leopard install disk (1 HFS Journaled Partition with GUID Partition table). R-Studio showed the EFI and Macintosh HD on that reformated drive, again, same sectors as before. So I figured I could just copy just the bytes where the Macintosh HD starts from the corrupted drive to the clone (using ddrescue). That worked, after almost 24 hours, I had the clone drive with a "disk1" partition on it that even disk utility could see.
Now I was able to run Disk Warrior on it, but all it could do was recover a few Application folders (Resource-Folders and lproj-stuff), about 100 MB in total. It couldn't repair more of catalog file apparently. Luckily, Time Machine backed up quite a bit (300 GB out of 400 GB of data) and I was able to manually copy all the Dokuments, Desktop, user Library, Applications, Music, Download and Movies. Unfortunatley, only a little bit of the Pictures folder was copied. iPhoto library (80 to 100 GB) was nowhere to be found, backup must have failed right then. I can salvage the drives (time machine drive, original hard drive with a few broken sectors, DMG-image of that drive, 1-1 copy of that drive with partition table repaired) but that only gives me files with numeric names and today's date on teh JPEGs (instead of the date the picture was taken).
Is there any way I can recover that iPhoto library? It appears the catalog file got corrupted because the hard drive (only 8 months old...) failed on a few sectors. If I understand it correctly, the catalog file on HFS+ file systems is where the folder structure and file names are stored in a B-Tree. I can't imagine that some i/o error during backup can totally annihilate that file when it was working perfectly before. Here's a few things I want to try out but haven't figured out how so far:
- Time Machine had to start a new backup. There's plenty of free space on that drive so there's a good chance there's old data left on it. Is there a way to restore files (including file names) and fodlers from deleted time machine backups?
- Is there any way to re-build that catalog file from what is there left on the original hard drive? I can't imagine 65 kilobytes destroys it all.
- Are there other ways to recover my iPhoto Library? The raw JPEG (and AVI) files with correct file names or metadata would suffice.
Thanks in advance for any help, I'll actually reward the person with a working solution, 5 years of photo memories are somewhat important. It really ***** that a failure during a backup destroys that...

Final Update:
The catalog file on the original hard drive could not be fixed. Seems like Mac OSX tried to repair the catalog file while the sectors this file resides on failed. To make things worse the partition table was also broken beyond repair, even overwriting the sectors with a new correct partition table didn't help. DiskWarrior found less then 100 MB worth of stuff, mainly Applications folders.
I recovered pretty much everything from the incomplete Time Machine backup by right-clicking the sparsebundle and browsing through the folders with the long alphanumeric names, looking for the version of the folder with the most files in there. All I was missing was part of the ~/Pictures folder, i.e. photobooth pictures and the whole iPhoto Library. My best option was to recover these files using data recovery tools.
DiskDrill proved to be the absolute best, fast, responsive, efficient, and the only one able to mount the DMG-file with no valid file system on it. As there were many i/o errors and broken sectors on the original hard drive, I made a copy of it using a free command line tool called ddrescue (the standard dd tool just aborted when it encountered the i/o error). ddrescue copied the whole drive to a DMG image, I had 56 kilobytes with errors on the first pass, but it managed to shrink that down to just 4 kilobytes (wow!) after the second pass where it tries to re-read the broken secors. It took about 24 hours for a 512 GB 2.5" drive (5400 rpm) but well worth it. Be advised that ddrescue is really persistent and tries everything to recover those last errorneous bytes. At the very end of the process, the read/write head of the hard drive just goes wild trying to catch the data on the sectors with different momentum. This works but I assume this is pretty damaging for the original drive. I also copied it all to a new hard drive (again using ddrescue) and tried partition and catalog repair tools on that (DiskWarrion, testdiks, pdisk, etc.). Still no hint of a good result.
I made a deep scan on the clone hard drive with DiskDrill. At the end (after about 8 hours over USB) it found 13 partition (I assume that's the Macintosh HD, EFI and some DMG files lying around) and hundreds of thousands of pictures. I restored some JPG files just to check the quality, some were damaged, some were good with all the EXIF data intact. I just made it copy all JPG files into a folder. I know the pictures taken from my camera produce JPGs larger than 1 MB and smaller than 5 MB, so I sorted them by size and moved the smaller and larger files into seperate folders. I took the remaining folder (100 GB) and just dragged it into iPhoto. It imported them overnight. Auto-Split by events and I got my library back, alas with different file names, originals and edited versions side by side, lots of duplicates, some damaged, some not. But hey, all the pictures in chronological order. Okay there was also one large event with all the JPGs without valid EXIF data landed inside, iPhoto just takes the file creation date (i.e. the date where the recovered file was copied). As far as I can tell, these are all just data corpses, halfway overwritten copies, random pictures from the internet, desktop pictures, etc.
I started to work my way back through the events, deleting the duplicates and renaming the events. There's an app called "Duplicate Annihilator" which apparently can find duplicate pictures in iPhoto and mark them for you. The free version only does 500 pictures but if it works, I'll get the full version. It can mark th eduplicate photos by adding something to the picture comment in iPhoto so you can manually review it all. Good stuff!

Can Time Machine backup a USB drive connected to Airport Extreme?

Hi all,
I have an airport extreme that I used to run a shared USB drive for the family. I have a network drive attached to the airport extreme which I used for Time Machine backups, how do I tell Time Machine to back up the USB drive also?
All help very gratefully recieved.

Thanks for your reply,
When I open Time Machine preferences I can either select a different disk to use as the backup disk or exclude items from the back up. I cannot find an option to add the USB drive attached to my airport extreme. Apologies if I am being a little dumb.

Time Machine backup FROM multiple drives?

I'm in the process of choosing a new MacPro, someone on these forums recommended Digilloyd's Mac Performance Guide as a good place to get help setting up a new mac for speed. The simplified version of what he advocates is replacing the stock internal drive with an SSD drive, on which you put the OS, apps & home folder. He then recommends creating a 0-raid stripe from 3 other drives to separate & hold your data, then using the forth internal bay drive (or another 0-raid stripe of the leftover, slower portions of various partitions of the drives) for Time Machine.
My question is, can Time Machine backup both drives (boot & data raid-0) or would I have to choose one of them?
+The more I read, the more confused I get+.

OK, I've scanned through the various articles. My thoughts are still essentially the same, and that is just how effective the entire system is when using multiple partitions from several drives to combine into multiple RAIDs. In reality this is not speed effective if the RAIDs need to be accessed concurrently. A read/write head can only be in one place at a time meaning that when one partition on the drive is being accessed, the OS cannot concurrently access another partition on the same drive.
Essentially this is how I understand the configuration at a simplistic level. Let's suppose we have two hard drives that we'll call Drive A and Drive B. Each drive is partitioned into two equally sized volumes that we'll refer to as follows:
....................... *Drive A* ......................... *Drive B* ......
Volume................. 1 ..................................... 3 ............
Volume................. 2 ..................................... 4 ............
Now, we will make two RAID arrays. RAID A uses Volume 1 and Volume 3, and RAID B uses Volume 2 and Volume 4.
Suppose you want to copy data from RAID A to RAID B. In order to do this the OS must first copy data from RAID A before it can write the data to RAID B. However, if RAID A was created using two separate drives (say, Drive A and Drive B,) and RAID B was created using two separate drives (say, Drive C and Drive D,) then the OS can copy from RAID A while concurrently writing to RAID B. This is physically possible because two read/write heads are involved instead of one. Theoretically the second construct is going to be much faster than the first construct.
My second observation is with regard to the reliance on external storage. A 2nd or 3rd generation Mac Pro's SATA bus is capable of a data interface rate of 3.0 Gb/sec. Firewire 800 is capable of 800 Mb/sec. The MP's internal SATA bus can support data transfer rates nearly four times that of Firewire. A modern hard drive is capable of saturating the Firewire bus, but not the internal SATA bus. The higher interface rate of the SATA bus means it's much better suited for truly fast RAID arrays. This is not the case for the Firewire bus.
External Firewire arrays are better suited for storage that does not require frequent or fast access.
Now with all this said it makes more sense to fully understand what your overall storage needs are then consider suitable designs. One need not rely on complicated RAID arrays if they aren't required. The focus should be on data access, data storage, and backup needs.
Although it's nice being able to brag at the cocktail party about having a fast SSD for your boot drive, let's consider how often you even need to boot the computer. I put my computers to sleep when they aren't in use. I never boot the computer unless a software update requires it or the computer has crashed completely. I haven't had the latter occur very often - mainly when I'm experimenting. Literally days, weeks, or months may go by before I reboot the computer. So a fast SSD boot drive would be for me a hugh waste of money.
My 1st generation Mac Pro is set up for my needs. It has four 500 GB fast Hitachi enterprise level hard drives. I use enterprise level drives that cost more because the computer is always on, so I want drives that will be reliably working. I used to have four Maxtor 300 GB drives that lasted for four years before I replace them with the Hitachis. My setup has one drive partitioned into a startup volume and a Boot Camp volume. One drive is my 'scratch' drive used for different OS system versions and/or seed testing. Two drives are configured as a mirrored RAID and used as the primary backup for the boot volume. The boot volume is 450 GBs and the Windows volume is 50 GBs. There's no backup for the Windows volume at the present time. Backups are usually done in the late afternoon using a backup utility. Presently that utility is Synk Standard, but I've also used Synchronize! Pro X and Carbon Copy Cloner. Backups are done on a fixed schedule in the background so they are virtually transparent to me. I use a mirrored RAID for backup to provide redundancy. If one backup drive fails hopefully the other will still be usable to protect the backup. I also have one external Firewire drive that contains a clone of the startup volume. The clone is updated monthly by incremental backup. It's for security in the worst case scenario that both drives in the mirrored RAID were to fail simultaneously.
Now, my need for frequent and fast access to data such as might be needed for streaming music or video is non-existent, so my configuration is one that is well-suited to my needs. You'll note that it's both simple and practical while providing data backup that's doubly secure.

Time Machine backups to networked drive - TOO slow?

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