Time Machine scare

Software
1

For no particular reason, I clicked the Time Machine icon in my toolbar yesterday. Got a serious scare as it happily reported that most recent backup was performed “June 12”. (WTF!?!)

I am so accustomed to TM always working, so I never had reason to monitor it earlier. As I check the back of my iMac, of course the USB cable has been borrowed for another device. 100% user error, granted, but what’s up with TM being so complacent and happy not to do any work? I really could have used a red triangle or badge on that toolbar icon. I got lucky this time, and it backed up some 40GB overnight.

So, do make sure your external drive is attached and accessible folks :slight_smile:

3

Right? That would have been most helpful, but alas, not a single warning to be seen.

4

It’s easy to let things go, especially when you’ve never been burned. I learned my lesson when I made a change to a server at work and lost three days of work for some people. My backup logs showed the nightly backup had been completing successfully for months. It hadn’t. Fortunately it had only been failing for the past 3 days. That’s when I started verifying all my backups by making regular test restores.

I’m retired now, but I still test my personal backups.

6

And just to be sure, is backup automatically turned on?

7

@Wolfie I have looked for a notification setting, but have not found one.

@JohnAtl Yes, it is on and it has performed as expected all day.

@WayneG I recently “lost” my Synology too, due to a power outage flicker. Synology support had logged in and determined it was nothing they could do. By some divine magic, after being spun down for a few days, it magically started up again and presented all my data! The critical data (15 years of family photos) were securely backed up to Amazon Glacier, but I did have several TB of resources I had bought online. At first, I had much less, so the logic was “I can always re-download that stuff”. However, at present, that would have taken me weeks, so I promptly added that folder to the backup set too :slight_smile:

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8

I should clean up and then package up my Time Machine scripts for TextBar. I get an :warning: icon in the menu bar if Time Machine hasn’t run for a matter of hours.

I have another one that uses a similar nag if I haven’t updated my daily Carbon Copy Cloner in the past 24 hours.

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