Feh. Time Machine sucks. After a painful setup process, I left Time Machine to do its thing. I just saw it mount a disk image that it created on the remote volume, so I know that all the speculation about enhancements to AFP (and possibly HFS+) are bunk. If it’s going to create disk images, it could do the same thing on any kind of file server. There’s no excuse for the AEBS not working.
That, I’m sick, and it’s pretty clear Cal’s going to lose to ASU. Fuck, what a shitty weekend.
Update: Feh. Time Machine does not estimate time remaining nor current data rate. I seem to be getting about 28.92 GB/h (over wired gigabit Ethernet).
Update: Time Machine really consumes CPU cycles. When the MBP is idle, the fans are not audible. Since Time Machine has been backing up, they've been continuously audible. The average data transfer rate has dropped to 16.9 GB/h. I have spent a few minutes of the last two hours watching streaming video, and doing a little bit of other work, but mostly it has been running undisturbed. mdimport is also running, not sure why.
Update: The combination of Time Machine and Leopard on the client and server make for some seriously fast network volume mounting! Whereas SuperDuper! takes ages to mount a network volume served by a Buffalo GigaStation NAS (first the volume, then the disk image on that volume, a process that takes several minutes), Time Machine and Leopard get the disk image mounted in seconds. After clicking on the Time Machine icon in the Dock, most of the time spent waiting for time machine to actually engage (with a tip of the hat to Picard) is waiting on the server’s drives to wake up.
I have yet to see how well the whole system does when I sleep the MBP, go to another network, and wake it up again. Maybe I’ll try that this afternoon. For sure I’ll try it when I go to work tomorrow.
One other note: When engaging Time Machine, the network volume does not mount; only the disk image mounts. Not sure how they pull that off, but maybe that’s one of the enhancements to AFP in Leopard. Hardware Growler reports both the server volume and the disk image mounting; just the network volume is hidden from the desktop (even though I have configured things to show mounted volumes).
When Time Machine begins an automatic backup, it does not display the floating progress window. Opening the System Preferencs panel shows a progress bar, though.
Update: Time Machine doesn’t deal well with lost servers. I engaged Time Machine, let it mount the backup volume (disk image), closed the lid on the MBP (it took a minute or more to sleep, but this is not new behavior in Leopard for me), and went to a breakfast place with free WiFi. There, I opened the MBP, saw the Time Machine screen still up, waited for Hardware Growler to indicate that the system had self-assigned an IP address, and then started moving through time. After a bit of back-and-forth, Time Machine appeared to hang (although the starry background animation continued). After several minutes (5 - 10), I decided to force-quit Time Machine. Pressing Command-Option-Escape had no effect, and after pressing it several times, Time Machine suddenly disengaged and there was a server-disconnect dialog on the screen.
Also, during the time that Time Machine was up, a dialog was presented asking if I wanted to join one of a couple of networks, including the free one at at the breakfast place. However, I was unable to click on any of the networks to select them, and hence, was unable to join a network (the window could move, and the “Other…†and “Cancel†buttons worked fine). Feh. Feh.