BTW I take back my comments about speed being reasonable, with it taking about 1hr20min for 25Gb backup. That’s about twice as long as a similar sized windows backup (based on work I was doing with Lenovos back in June

last year. But hey, it’s done now. The other annoyance is that if you leave the drive connected it seems to ‘have a quick look’ at it every 15 min or so. The idea of 1 hour backup increments is nice in theory, but really annoying when it makes it’s presence felt visibly and audibly every hour. And being Apple, there doesn’t seem a way to change it.

I’m coming to the conclusion that windows sits nicely between Mac and Linux in terms of control. It gives you the ability to control everything that’s important and quite a lot of the stuff that’s pretty, but without being painful about the whole business. And you can do it all without having to buy stuff.

The Tosh drive matches the Macbook very well BTW.

The NTFS/FAT32/HFS+ is one I keep coming across, what is the best way to move large files from Mac’s to PC’s and back again. MacFUSE seems to be quite good from the little experience I’ve got of it. I think at some point in the future I’m going to go down the NAS route and format the drives with NFS, should sort the problem fine

Time machine is a little easier, as it takes control away from the user and says ‘do you want to back up to this drive, Yes or No?’ So it’s a typical Mac app really, with limited choices and a no-sweat interface. I partitioned the drive in half first (1TB is quite a big drive) with half in FAT32 for the PC and half as Mac OS extended (Journalled). I’ll probably reformat the FAT32 into NTFS when I connect the drive to the PC, since OSX can’t handle NTFS without additional software.

The good – data transfer rate seems acceptable, writing about 800-900Mb/min, which is quite fair for backup across a USB interface.

The less good is that the Macbook case gets quite surprisingly warm during this process. Shouldn’t happen too often though, as it’s a (presumably) full transfer of around 25Gb.

The drive itself is fairly quiet – rather wish I could have got a Samsung drive in a case, but that would take real money. This is about as cheap a 1Tb drive is going to be for a while.

Manual software, I heard it was an intern! Seriously one of my tasks is to organize the offsite tape storage every week. But then this is a Unix tar/gz solution, mind you, still runs as a cron job

Please tell me you’re kidding about no knowing it was there?

It is very simple to use – desperately easy actually. What it is not is a drive mirror package, so if you trash your system you will need bootable floppies in order to restore the PC. It is also possible to create a virgin windows install and then restore over the top from the backup if you backed up the entire computer, rather than just the data.

But hey, this is windows. Who bothers to back that up?

Yes, there’s a difference between automated backup software and manual software. It’s called a scheduler. I have used some commercial backup apps and my experience is that they work really well at automated incremental backups, right up until the moment you need to restore. Then, curiously, the windows backup you happened to make is the only one that actually can be recovered. I’m sure there’s some great backup software out there, but for windows, it’s never passed the ‘so what’ test.

My external drive should be here tomorrow – I’ll let you know how I get on with time machine then.

For me there’s a world of difference between an automated incremental backup piece of software and a manual (albeit regular) tar/zip type of backup. I know and use both everyday which I think for any power/corporate user is the way to go.

Of course the thing with all this software is how good and how quick is it at getting the machine going again.

1) whatever you back up is what gets restored. You can’t restore individual files.

2) it’s manual only, so there’s no weekly automated backup, although windows scheduler might be able to do this (I’ve never bothered to investigate – windows really is VERY good and very powerful). It will do incremental and compressed backups.

I have restored a number of machines successfully from the XP version and (I think) one from W98. Time machine looks cool and apparently works too, which is nice. I’ll let you know what I think when the external drive arrives.