Apple Time Machine III

I wrote about Apple's Time Machine backup software after upgrading to OS-X 10.8.3 where I found the software under 10.8.2 had problems. Well, it still does have problems which are worse than the problems under 10.8.2. So it's simple to me that the software sucks.

First the complete backup, which took only 8 hours the first time, quickly jumped to 13 hours the next times after zeroing the TC's hard drive. That's still faster but still too long for just 300 GBytes of stuff (only the primary HD of the four, the rest backed up overnight using Integral's software).

The problem is that every 1-2 days the backup decides to go nuts and instead of backing up the normal hour's work, which is usually a few gigabytes takes 3-5 minutes, less if you're doing nothing or the Mac is sitting idle, it decides to back up 25-50+ GBytes of stuff.

What stuff is a good question but it seems to just lose what's new for the last hour and backup the whole fucking day and more, again. That quickly eats a 1 TB HD over 2-3 weeks where you get to no unusued memory and the backup taking longer to clear space for new backups.

In short, I ended up watching the space and when it gets to less than 100 GBytes, I stop the backup and erase (zero) the HD and start over. I do this because the backup only takes longer when it has to clear memory first when it shouldn't in the first place.

And now for the second time in a row of testing within a week, the backup went nuts within two days, this time eating 50+ GBytes of memory for nothing. And no one on the Apple forum has any clues or ideas what to check or debug with the backup.

And Apple needs to address this, by allowing users to check the TC's HD directly - only technicians at Apple stores have the software to do this, and provide users with debugs tools to find why it's going nuts every few days for no apparent reason.

Apple is better than this because the backup worked great under 10.8.0-10.8.1 and then it broke under 10.8.2 and is worse now under 10.8.3. So, Apple, how about some help?