It's time to vent. Last night I upgraded my Mac mini's internal hard drive, from 80 GB to a 160 GB, so that I could store all my music on a single hard drive. (Yes, I have over 80 GB of purchased music—and that doesn't even cover the stuff from Michelle that I need to consolidate into my our library.) The upgrade went fine and the system worked great upon re-assembly.
I formatted the new internal drive with a journaled, Mac OS extended filesystem and named it "Audio", just like it's 80 GB predecessor. I also had the system write zeros to every block in the hope of finding any bad blocks up front. Then I tried to restore all the files from my Time Machine backup.
Now, to get Time Machine to display correctly I have to drop the resolution down from the normal 1920 x 1200 of my 23" display, down to 1600 x 1200. If I don't do this the Time Machine background flashes, drives the CPU load through the roof, and is generally unresponsive. (Yes, I filed a bug with Apple about a month after 10.5 was released, and no, of course Apple hasn't responded.)
So I dropped the resolution (a decidedly Windozian thing to have to do), started Time Machine, stepped back to the point where all my audio files were still present on the Audio drive, selected all and clicked "Restore."
Nothing happened.
The Restore button wouldn't respond to any mouse clicks if I had more than a handful of folders selected for restoring. On a hunch I dropped the display resolution down to 1024 x 768 et voilà! Time Machine is snappy and happily restores all my files. Great!
An hour goes by, Time Machine kicks off its regularly scheduled backup, but at the end of the backup it fails, complaining that its "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while linking files on the backup volume." Cr@p. After thinking about it for a bit I wonder if its trying to link the new files to the old ones from the old hard drive. I could see that making sense in a geez-we-didn't-think-about-that-corner-case kinda way, so I excluded the Audio volume, did a successful backup of all the other data, then re-added Audio and ran the backup again.
Now I get error 12, which is apparently a different kind of linking error.
Disk Utility says that Audio's in good shape, and so does DiskWarrior, so there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the disk, but Time Machine refuses to back it up. What the heck? How am I supposed to trust this software to maintain good copies of my valuable data when it fails so easily and mysteriously? I left Retrospect because it couldn't keep up with the changes in the Mac OS, but it seems that even Apple can't engineer a robust backup solution. Grumble.
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