Leopard's Time Machine should have been better tested, drive maker says

Computerworld - Apple Inc. gets an "A" for effort on Time Machine but barely a passing grade in execution, an executive at a major disk drive maker said today after answering questions from users frustrated with the company's new backup and restore software.

Mike Mihalik, an ombudsman and former vice president of engineering at LaCie Ltd., criticized Apple's testing before the company launched its new Leopard operating system. "The two tech notes that it's released clarify what Apple should have done as part of the normal release," said Mihalik, referring to a pair of recent support documents that address problems users have reported with the backup tool. Instead, he said, it was as if Apple "Said 'oops, we forgot to check that.'"

Heavily-trafficked threads on Apple's support forums contain a number of complaints about Time Machine, the most aggressively-touted addition to Mac OS X 10.5. The complaints, which include stalled backups, invisible backup sets and drives that refused to work with the program when connected via FireWire, have drawn scores of posters and thousands of views.

Mihalik, who monitors the support forums for LaCie, has been active on several threads since the Oct. 26 debut of Leopard, responding to users who blamed their LaCie disk drives for Time Machine problems. Mihalik, who denied that his company's drives are at fault, instead blamed Apple.

"What's disconcerting is that what we as developers saw over the last couple of months is not what was delivered to customers," he said. "Apple made changes after the last developer update, and it's not the same."

Specifically, said Mihalik, Apple disabled the ability to backup using Time Machine to a network share. "They made the right decision; it's not stable," he said. "But it's also an indication of other problems."

Among those problems, he said, were oversights that Apple only recently corrected in the two support documents, one of which spelled out how to set up a drive to work with Time Machine. "Apple could have added a simple check to verify that the drive did not have a Master Boot Record partition," said Mihalik.

The Master Boot Record problem, Mihalik argued, stems from Apple's last-minute decision to pull support for the FAT32 file system, an older scheme used by Windows, from Time Machine. "They backtracked, though, probably because of the 4GB file-size limitation of FAT32. They would have had to break up Time Machine backups." Time Machine stores its backups as single files, often very large files considerably above the 4GB limit of FAT32.

The other issue Apple has addressed, that of computer names including nonalphanumeric characters causing backups to not appear in the Time Machine interface, should also have been noted -- and a blocker put into place to prevent improper names, he added.