Mac Leopard, iTunes, apple lossless best backup

What's wrong with Time Machine?

Just check out a few of the discussions here. Nothing is "wrong" with TimeMachine as a concept. But if you go to the Apple discussion forums you will come across a whole lot of reports from early on where folks had lost data from relying on it. There has also been problems with Disk Utility formating FAT32 drives at that time. Again, Mac has come up with an update since then, so it may all be sorted out at this point. If TimeMachine is working, that's fine. I don't know if it can be set to back up an external (non-boot) drive with your music files on it. Certainly if you've put them on your boot drive it will back them up, but I don't do that. As I understand it, it backs up your boot (startup) drive that has Leopard on it. I've been using it successfully thus far on my g5 tower, but I've yet to have to rely upon the backup. My suggestion was to give it time to prove itself out. It's a great feature, don't get me wrong.

"I'm not sure if it'll work, but within iTunes there is a "back up to disk" command - not sure it will work to an external disk though"

This is only for backing up to DISC not DISK. I wish it worked for both.

- Chris
Computer Audiophile | Turn Down The Silence

http://www.computeraudiophile.com

I see. To date, I haven't had any problem with it - knock on wood - although I thought my HD was going to burn up during the initial backup (about 500GB of data). It [i]will[/i] back up anything you ask it to. I have two internals and one external which all back up to a separate 1TB external.

I'll admit that I do have a separate backup just in case, though I haven't updated it since upgrading to leopard.

If you haven't upgraded to Leopard there's a great $28 application called SuperDuper that makes backups simple and painless. It has a very intuitive interface and will do anything from incremental backups of a single folder to creating a bootable mirror image of your system drive. There's a free trial version available. I've been using it to back up to a pair of external drives and am very impressed with the ease of use and functionality.

Jdillard,

As changes are made to a file, Time Machine wants to keep multiple versions of the file so that you can go back in time to retrieve the old version. As you reorganize tracks in iTunes, iTunes will rename tracks and move tracks from folder to folder causing multiple copies of the same track being backed up by Time Machine. Also, any changes made to embedded meta data (artist, genre, track number, etc...) will cause multiple copies being backup as well. Obviously, this is not a very efficient way of using disk space.

What you really want is a program that will keep your primary iTunes library and the backup library completely in sync. If a file is deleted from primary, it should be deleted from backup. If a file is added to primary, it should be added to backup as well. In other words, you want the backup to be identical to the primary.

In the case the primary crashes, you want to be able to simply replace the primary with the backup (maybe with minor configuration change due to different volume names), restart iTunes and get back to business. You can't do that with Time Machine. With Time Machine, you must get a new drive and restore all your music files from the backup. It may take a whole day if you have 500G of music.