Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"Showing us that there is, in fact a much more useful application for an old Mac Plus than a DJ using it as a helmet, Macenstein reader Dean Gray has turned his 1986 Mac Plus 1 MB into a Time Machine Server."

I always enjoy seeing new uses for the old Apple products, and this one is no exception. He is using a digital frame and an Intel Atom motherboard to create a nice little server, and quite the conversation piece. This is something I'd buy if someone was selling them.

"Decho Corp. said today the latest Mac release of its MozyHome and MozyPro online backup service fixes a problem it was having associated with saving backups sent to it by Apple Inc.'s Time Machine backup tool, which works with Apple's Time Capsule network-attached storage device."

Apparently they discovered a bug in 1.4.1 of their backup for Mac, which caused the Time Machine software to freeze up when used in conjunction with Time Capsule. This update is supposed to fix that for both Pro and Home versions. If you don't use online backups, you probably should since they are so inexpensive, and if you have less than 2GB, this one is free for home users. For unlimited it is $4.95/month USD which is comparable to other online storage companies, such as Carbonite and BackBlaze. I'm a convert (currently using BackBlaze).

"If you've been having issues with corrupted Time Machine images either inside the Time Capsule or connected externally to your base station, the 7.4.1 firmware update (for all base stations from 2007 to today) plus the 10.5.6 update might help, according to TidBITS."

TidBITS says to start fresh after archiving your saved data, but Apple says this will fix whatever problems may have cropped up without starting fresh. I guess do what you think is best. Luckily for me I haven't experienced any problems with mine and to be honest, this is the first time I've heard of any problems of this kind.

"A few days ago I reformatted my Drobo because it was acting up. I believe this was due to a system reinstall and not the fault of the Drobo. Prior to reinstalling I was made aware of the fact that the Drobo, like virtually all expandable mass-storage devices, "lies" to the computer about its disk size. This "lie" is beneficial if you plan to expand the size of your disk drives. It leaves "room to grow." The "lie" is a horrible one, however, for Time Machine, which prunes its backups automatically when a disk is full."

I'm glad someone worked this out, actually. Time Machine is great, but can be a real resource hog when it comes to hard disk space. This is probably going to be next weekend's project for me. I totally love my Drobo and I'm glad someone worked this out. Alternatively, there's an app you can load into the Drobo called Time Tamer. It's available here and it's totally free.