November 6th, 2007 : Time Machine’s Panic Attack
I love SuperDuper. I’s a great application for backing up, and well worth it’s price tag. When I heard about Time Machine, I thought it sounded like a really neat feature, albeit one that I would probably not use very often, but one can never have enough backups.
When I use SuperDuper, I usually try to close as many apps as I can, and leave my computer alone. Every now and then, however, I find that I need to check my email or quick view a web-page or listen to music while I am backing up, and I can do this with relatively no problem at all. When SuperDuper backs something up, it says: “Want that backed up? Okay, let me get on that. We’ll just plug away at it while you do something else. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”
Time Machine has a different philosophy. When the computer starts up or is plugged back into the Time Machine external drive, Time Machine says: “It’s time to backup data! STOP EVERYTHING! GOOD HEAVENS MAN!! IT’S BEEN 60 MINUTES SINCE THE LAST BACKUP!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S AT STAKE HERE!!! THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE YESTERDAY!!! BACK UP DATA NOW!!!”
And Time Machine hijacks the computer throwing every available resource at backup up, almost giving the impression that this event is bigger than a national disaster.
To say Time Machine is a resource hog would not be adequate. Time Machine is a resource tyrant. For me, there’s nothing more annoying than logging into my computer, and suddenly having my computer grind to a screeching halt for 3 to 5 minutes while my machine merrily backs up all of it’s data from the past several hours that I haven’t been using my computer. (Even if I did make a few changes the night before.)
I did a clean install of my hard drive, I don’t have a whole lot on my computer right now. I have about 5 document files and I have added maybe a dozen of my necessary programs, there isn’t a whole lot that needs to be backed up. I imagined that Time Machine would do a slow backup in the background, to me, that would make sense, but that apparently isn’t the goal of Time Machine.
Hopefully Apple will allow for some more customization of Time Machine, perhaps allowing a set processor usage cap, or allowing for a set time interval of backups (I’d do 12 or 24 hours.) Or perhaps just a simple check to see how much processor power the user is using at the time, and then taking half of what’s left. There are plenty of options, they simply need to be implemented.
Until then, I’ll just have to put up with my psychotic buddy and his hourly processor raids.