According to my Chicago-based son, we should ship Halloween back to America and adopt Thanksgiving Day instead. It is, according to him, the only holiday where you get to eat a lot, drink a lot, then slump in front of Star Trek Enterprise all afternoon. Best of all, you don’t have to buy any presents.

Roast Turkey, the traditional Thanksgiving Day meal, was not something early settlers learned about from the North American Indians, who apparently thought the local wild turkeys a very inferior bird. The first turkeys the settlers ate were domesticated ones they had brought with them from Norfolk. Turkeys had already become well known in Europe after Cortez had brought them back from Mexico.

Time for Intelligence
Time Machine, Apple’s new backup software, is dead easy to use and definitely no turkey but it could be a little more intelligent. The smallest amount it will backup is one file so if we make a change that only effects one byte in that file, Time Machine will create a whole new copy of the changed file as well as the original. If that happens to be a 600Mb image, 99% of it is already in Time Machine’s vault but a completely new version will be saved so that a 1 byte change will effectively take up 1200Mb.

What will be the best way to go about archiving Time Machine archives? Currently, our Time Machines are backing-up one drive on each computer, to an external hard disk for each. This gives us hourly backups for the last 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and weekly backups until the disks are full. When that point is reached, Time Machine will start to delete the oldest files. But do we want it to?

Last Orders
We have already filled one Maxtor 250GB drive and attempted to move its Time Machine database to a larger external drive but ran into permissions problems. In the end it was easier and faster to recreate the Time Machine database from scratch. The original Maxtor 500XT, a Firewire 400, 5400rpm hard disk, only ever had light duties. It had taken about 5 hours to create the first Time Machine backup. The second drive replacing the Maxtor, a brand new Western Digital MyBook Pro, running Firewire 800 at 7200rpm. The difference in speed is amazing, taking just half the time to create Time Machine’s vault.

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One simple solution might be to change Time Machine’s interval between making backups. This should be easy to do by editing the file com.apple.backupd-auto.plist which is in the System/Library/LaunchDaemons folder. Here the figure to edit is the number 3600 (highlighted above) where 3600 is the number of seconds between backups.

Another way is to use a utility such as Lingon where Time Machine’s settings are in the ‘System Daemons’ list.
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Note the friendly message you get (read out too if you have Text to Speech turned on). I haven’t tried either method.
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Apple themselves recommend running Time Machine as manual backups while Aperture is running. More here.

Any suggestions on how to organise or copy our Time Machine archives are welcome.