Well, I finally gave up on time machine. I only had it actually working successfully for a few days. Even then, it was only doing “hourly” backups every few hours. But then my computer crashed at some point while it was doing one of the hourlys. And it could never recover. It would think for a couple days, then Time Machine would crash. And then it would try again. Wash Rinse Repeat. If I zeroed everything and had it start from scratch, it would start an initial backup, but it would go slowly (at a pace to do my whole 500GB drive in about a week) and some random thing or other would crash the computer before it was done, and once again it would never recover.

I used to use Super Duper! to do my daily backups, but it is not yet Leopard compatible, although the developer says “soon”. So I am now in the process of trying out Carbon Copy Cloner. As I speak it is doing an initial backup of my drive. The computer crashed last night while it was doing things, but CCC was able to just pick up and do a new incremental backup instead of getting confused. So crossing my fingers that I’ll get a new good backup again, and then nightly backups will resume.

I really really wanted to use Time Machine. It was one of the BIG things I wanted from Leopard. And I still really want to use it. I will probably try it again when Apple releases 10.5.2, and 10.5.3… etc, until hopefully eventually it works well for me. Sigh.

(And yes, I’ve tried all the things I’ve found on a bunch of different forums for making Time Machine work faster/better/at all, but no luck.)

In the mean time, CCC for now.