Issues With Time Machine in Mac Mountain Lion

Mac OS X is one of the most popular operating systems among tech people. It is very demandable and trustworthy for its unique integrated features and performance. One of the popular utility is 'Time Machine'. It is a data back-up utility developed by Apple for the Mac OS X. It was introduced with the release of Mac OS X 10.5.

The need of backup was felt a long before the launch of Time Machine in Mac. Mac users used to backup their data using CD/DVD or writing data in some external drive. But, it was lengthy and expensive process. The process was not widely accepted because whenever changes were made in original data the respective changes were not updated in respective backup.

Time Machine creates incremental backups of files, which can be restored at later date. So, if you delete any files mistakenly, you can recover easily with time machine. It works with iLife, iWork and several other compatible programs. Time Machine saves hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month until the volume runs out of space.

How Time Machine works?

It copies the files on your computer to a destination hard drive as a back up to protect you in case of any disaster or data loss. It keeps Incremental backup and works with Time Capsule.

What is Time Capsule?

The backup device used by time machine is called Time capsule. An external drive is used for keeping Backup data in Mac OS X and it is called Time capsule.

Incremental backup- An incremental backup is a type of backup that only copies files that have changed since the last backup. It saves time and money both. But, Mac user can face some limitations or drawback of Time Machine .

Problems related to Time Machine in Mountain Lion:-

1. Backup is not bootable:- Even though Time Machine backs up every file on your disk but if your internal HD fails, you can't boot directly from your Time Machine backups.

However, if you're using Lion 10.7.2 or above, and backing-up to a directly-connected external HD, there's probably a copy of your Recovery HD on the Time Machine drive, so if your internal HD fails, you can restore from that.

2. It doesn't keep data forever :- Time Machine doesn't keep its copies of changed/deleted items forever, and you're usually not notified when it deletes them(hourly backups combine and expire after a day).

3. It doesn't give you much control:- You can tell Time Machine to ignore particular files or folders by adding them to its Do Not Back Up list, But, you can’t exclude files based on certain criteria e.g all movie files over 2GB in size.

4. Doesn't compress files:- It doesn’t store duplicate copies of identical files, so it doesn’t compress your files.

5. Encryption:- By physical access of your Time Machine backup disk anyone can read all your files because It doesn't encrypt them.

6. Not compatible with FileVault:- Time Machine backs up FileVault-encrypted user folders only after logged out session—and does not permit file-by-file restoration of your FileVault data using the Time Machine program.

7. Doesn’t Use Optical Discs :- Time Machine can store its data only on a hard disk, not on CDs or DVDs

Keep backup with Stellar Drive ToolBox:-

Stellar Drive ToolBox is the complete pack of 13 utilities, it's upcoming version is 3.0. Drive clone is one of the most demandable backup utility which helps to keep backup of your Mac data. Time Machine cannot make clone of your Mac data but, you can easily create bootable backup of your Mac data which helps you to boot your system in case of any disaster. This utility provides many features like' image option', you can create image of your Mac data. So, this tool has the power to sole all your backup needs. The other benefit , you can gain from this tool is the maintenance utility which helps you to do partition, speed up, defrag, wipe, encryption etc. for your Mac.