Time Machine wipes out Boot Camp

I’ve been leery of using Time Machine automatic backup with Time Capsule (an Airport Extreme router with a 1TB internal drive) because I knew that full backups would take for-bloody-ever over 802.11n. One should accept such trade-offs in the interest of data protection, and I oughtn’t write about what I haven’t used.

I did not expect that satisfying this best practice would wipe out my MacBook Pro’s Boot Camp partition. I had an activated copy of Windows Vista Ultimate there, painstakingly outfitted with all of the incrementally released Vista updates, plus Office and Visual Studio. I booted to it less often than I used it with VMware Fusion. It saved me the trouble of keeping a Windows notebook handy.

So much for that. Boot Camp’s gone, its partition completely cleaned out, and that partition renamed “Time Machine Backups.” I selected the Time Capsule volume, plainly named “Tom Yager’s Time Capsule” (the default) before starting Time Machine. My Boot Camp volume wasn’t even on the list of potential targets. Why should it be? The Boot Camp partition was formatted for NTFS, a filesystem type that OS X can only read, not write. But write it did, and with vehemence.

Allow me to rattle off the list of opportunities to smell a rat that Time Machine’s developers missed: The partition was on my internal hard drive (rather defeating the purpose), it was a fraction (37.7GB) of the size of the volume I intended to back up, it was not empty, and its type was other than HFS+. I could almost forgive an off-by-one sort of error in Time Machine’s index of target volumes. I can’t forgive that none of the most basic and idiot-simple sanity checks I’ve described was performed. The cherry atop this effluvium sundae is this question: Why would Time Machine even count volume creation among its list of capabilities? I would leave it to the user to supply a suitable backup volume, wouldn’t you? That’s the point of presenting a list of target volumes instead of /dev… in the first place.

Lest anyone think that I’ve mounted a lofty steed over the loss of a Vista partition, let me point out that I do have a backup: The MacBook Pro from which my present machine was migrated. That older MacBook Pro is overdue to be returned to Apple; by rights, I shouldn’t have it. My procrastination about sending it back saved my hide.

Just the same, I’ll write this one off to karmic payback, and I’ll shield against future cosmic spankings by doing the right thing and returning Apple’s overdue loans. I’ll also image this MacBook Pro using asr (command line; use “man asr” to read about it) to my Xserve with Xserve RAID. I’ll increment the restorable images with rsync or find; find takes much longer but it can do date ranges, exclusion lists and other nifties. There are countless other ways to replace Time Machine; I’ll take suggestions on your favorites.

I’ll also put a copy of that asr image on my Solaris/AMD Shanghai server. ‘Cause you never know.