Thanks Joe, what does this mean, "I find myself using Pages and Numbers more than NeoOffice (which is far more powerful) because with the cloud based versions of those apps I don't even need an Apple device to access my files."
There are full featured on-line versions of Pages, Numbers, Mail, & Keynote on the iCloud web page that can be used through any browser on any computer, anywhere you have access to the internet. So if I start a document using Pages on my computer and save the file on my iCloud Drive I can log on from just about anywhere to continue working on the file.
So you recommend TM back up. so you clone one each day?
No I do not clone every day. I only clone before installing an OS update or upgrade, just in case something fails in the process. I have two Time Machine drives one named Local TM and the other named RAID and both are designated in System Preferences > Time Machine as Time Machine drives (see
this screenshot). As you can see in the screenshot at 15:23 today Time Machine used the Local TM drive and an hour later, at 16:22, the backup went to RAID. Each of those is an independent backup data set of the boot drive on my MacBook Pro. If I wish to recover a file I enter Time Machine in the normal way and the backup time line that appears is a composite of both Time Machine data sets. There is no no way of distinguishing between the two data sets. If I disconnect either and then enter Time Machine, instead of seeing hourly time intervals the time intervals will be every two hours. If I restore a file it will be restored from the data set associated with that unique time interval. Local TM does not back up RAID and
vice-versa as each is a self-contained backup data set.
Never thought of that, but logic being that the stuff on TM cannot be refound or redone?
The danger in using Finder to recover files in a Time Machine backup is multi-fold
- Time Machine backups are intricately interconnected by Unix hard-links and unlike aliases when a file is moved the link does NOT follow the file, but is in fact broken and since Finder can move files easily it presents a strong element of risk. Given the complex web of hard-links in a Time Machine backup you risk damaging the entire network of links therefore rendering the reliability of the entire backup data set questionable.
- If you use Finder to go into a Time Machine backup set to find a file there is no TIME reference. So you might extract a version of the file from an hour ago or an entirely different version from two hours ago or a year or more back in time and there is nothing to tell you which version it is. Which makes the whole point of Time Machine completely irrelevant.
