Time Machine/HFS question

[Christopher Wolf]

On Mar 5, 2008, at 12:06 AM, Justin C. Walker wrote:
> On Mar 4, 2008, at 20:41 , Christopher Wolf wrote:
>> On Mar 4, 2008, at 10:57 PM, Justin C. Walker wrote:
> Prior to 10.5.2, the TM pref panel was laid out differently (ISTR).

The only change to the preference pane layout that I can think of  
since 10.5 GM was the addition of a check-box in 10.5.2 to control  
whether the menu extra was visible. The first time you visit the Time  
Machine preference pane (before Time Machine has ever been configured)  
it does have a different appearance (where the only option is Choose a  
Disk...) - perhaps that is what you are remembering. Or perhaps you  
are remembering one of the various pre-release screen-shots on Apple's  
site (and leaked elsewhere) which showed the preference pane in  
various states of pre-release evolution.

> When this occurred, I was able to select the remote device in the TM  
> panel.

I believe you, but this is not something which you should have been  
able to do and it is puzzling as to why you were previously able to do  
so.

> I can guarantee that
> - the laptop running 10.5 has run *only* 10.5
>   since this experiment started
> - the Mac Pro serving the firewire drive has
>   *only* run 10.4.
> - I have added *no* hacks to the system (life's
>   now too short to fool around with that, since
>   I have real things to do with these systems :-};
>   I use `em as tools, and don't want to fuss with
>   things going wrong, beyond the normal things that
>   go wrong, like Time Machine going whacky on me :-})
>
> What I can't guarantee is the number of times, and length of time,  
> that the firewire drive was physically attached to the laptop.  It  
> was brief, and only a couple of times, but my memory is not what it  
> used to be...

Good to know that no hacks were involved. My only remaining hypothesis  
is that you may have previously been allowed to select the 10.4  
network drive because it had at one point been attached to the 10.5  
system and this confused Time Machine once the drive was mounted from  
the 10.4 system.

>> I'm saying that Time Machine *should* only allow you to configure  
>> backups to a 10.5 AFP server. If somehow you ended up backing up to  
>> a 10.4 server then the backups may have appeared to be working and  
>> the disk-image could have been updated while being served from the  
>> 10.4 server. However, I would not trust that backed up data. And it  
>> is not surprising that Time Machine is no longer working in that  
>> configuration and will not let you configure the 10.4 server as a  
>> backup destination anymore.
>
> The more I look at this, the more it looks like a problem that was  
> "fixed" in 10.5.2.

I concur.

> I saw this (belatedly); I was really interested in more, um,  
> detailed details :-}

The technical details, to the best of my knowledge, have not been  
disclosed.

> Thanks again for your detailed explanations.  I guess it's time to  
> walk up to the edge and push my Mac Pro into the 10.5 quarry...

Yes, currently, if you want to do network backups (without using any  
questionable hacks) you will need to upgrade the Mac Pro to 10.5 (or  
invest in a Time Capsule.)

Good luck,
Chris