[OSX-Users] Re: backing up while on road away from time capsule

[Vladimiro Sassone]

On 15 Sep 2011, at 11:56, Chris Andrews wrote:

> On Thursday, 15 September 2011 at 11:45, Jules wrote:
>> Lion will continue to do Time Machine backups to spare space on your laptop's own hard disk while it's away from its Time Capsule. Obviously this is no protection against disk failure, but it does provide protection against accidental file deletion or corruption.
> Most of the time, yes, it will. Sometimes, this non-GUI option turns itself off and you don't get local snapshotting (such as on my Air - no idea why). To find out if you've got it enabled, open a Terminal and run:
> 
> 	tmutil snapshot
> 
> If that errors out, it's disabled and you can run:
> 
> 	sudo tmutil enablelocal
> 
> to switch it back on.

I found the snapshot to be rather buggy and behave unreasonably, viz:

Begin forwarded message:
> From: Vladimiro Sassone <vs at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [OSX-Users] Key repeat
> Date: 1 August 2011 20:31:56 GMT+01:00
> To: Jules <sysjkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
> 
> Hi Jules,
> 
> 	Chasing a disk-space leak, I might have found a time-machine related bug in Lion. Apparently, when TM does a "local backup" (also called snapshot) on a laptop (e.g. because the TM disk isn't available), it backs up also ~/.Trash (whether or not you explicitly exclude it). Other exclusions (automatic or user-defined) appear to work well.
> 
> I am reasonably sure that .Trash is not backed up in non-local TM backups, this looks like a bug, doesn't it? Have you noticed it?

For further clarity, if you trash an item from a folder excluded from backups then, as a consequence of that, the item begins to be backed up in the local snapshots. I am afraid this is a deal-breaker for me: when I trash something is because I want it gone, even more so if it came from a folder excluded from back ups. But in general, to back up .Trash really appears to be the wrong semantics for snapshots. 

I have since disabled the snapshots waiting from improvements.

\vs
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