The annoyance of the weekend for me was Time Machine (OS X Leopard’s builtin backup solution) falling over on my MacBook Pro. I had it configured to back up over the wireless network to a drive that was connected to the iMac, and it had been working fine for about a month, but all of a sudden it started getting stuck with a ‘Preparing…’ message. Rebooting didn’t help, removing the old backup folder and recreating the prefs didn’t help. Annoyingly, it still works fine on Crumpet’s laptop and the iMac itself.
I spent too much time trying to get it to work, before switching it off and going back to my old solution, which was a simple rsync script to synchronise my user folder with the iMac’s drive. It doesn’t let me go back in time like Time Machine does, but it does work 100% of the time, and that’s what’s important to me.
That makes two Leopard features that are horribly buggy for me – Time Machine and Back to my Mac. Apple really need to start doing public betas of their operating systems instead of treating paying customers as beta testers. Roll on, 10.5.2.
