Apple's Leopard is spotty

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Time Machine, Apple’s backup/archiving management application that is arguably four years late to the game, is disabled on Apple clients unless Leopard Server is present — permitting only local storage devices. Apple confines the storage volumes where Time Machine client data can be stored to only HFS+ volumes, restricting internal or external drives based on other formats. When and only when Leopard Server is present and correctly configured (we found it takes little configuration), Apple clients can then use dedicated Time Machine storage volumes to make initial, then subsequent iterative backups to a network resource — but only to Leopard-based storage areas.

This scheme is better than almost none at all, which is the storage method previously used by Apple (unless a client user subscribed and backed up to Apple’s .Mac service, or used another commercial backup package). Savvy Leopard users can continue to use several freeware, shareware and commercial applications as alternatives to Time Machine if desired.

Our experience with Time Machine showed that only a small amount of initial network bandwidth is used as an initial ‘Time Machine’ backup of a client is made. It takes an hour to store 35GB per client machine.

Fresh and small-storage displacement clients take less than an hour, while heavily used machines can take several hours to backup initially. If a large number of machines start an initial backup or high-payload backup at once, network availability can be initially highly reduced as the freight of Time Machine initial backup data clogs network wires. Time Machine doesn’t work for Windows or Linux clients, which must use backup resources native to their operating systems.

Apple otherwise supports a large number of filing systems, including Sun’s ZFS — but only as a read-only file system. We verified this compatibility on one of our Solaris T2000 servers, and found that the mounting of ZFS on the Solaris 10 server was easy and trivial.

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