- Time machine help for restoring notes on the mac manual#
- Time machine help for restoring notes on the mac download#
ICloud Drive files which are already in local storage are fair game, though, and as far as I can tell, that’s all you’ll get in your Time Machine backup.
Time machine help for restoring notes on the mac download#
Even if Time Machine were to download these in rotation so as not to exceed local space available, how long might it take to perform that? Imagine having a 512 GB internal SSD, and over a terabyte of documents in your iCloud Drive, almost all of which were evicted from local storage.
This is perhaps most common among those who work with their Desktop & Documents folders in iCloud.įor Time Machine to be able to back up a file evicted to iCloud Drive, that file would need to be downloaded to local storage first. Quite a few users now have a great many files evicted to their iCloud Drives, far more than they could store locally. Here Apple has a sound rationale, although I can’t recall it explaining this to users anywhere. Any items which have been evicted to iCloud, and are only represented by local stub files, aren’t backed up.
The rule seems to be that Time Machine does back up the contents of your current iCloud Drive, but only those items which are currently stored locally. Maxwell notes that Time Machine doesn’t back up folders which are found in iCloud Drive, but in my experience it’s not as simple as that. In other words, this is deliberate, perhaps because of a bug in Photos. It happens because the database folder inside a Photos Library has an extended attribute of type :com_apple_backup_excludeItem which prevents it from being backed up by Time Machine. This is a strange behaviour on the part of Photos and Time Machine, given that manually copying Photos Libraries works around this issue perfectly well. I’ve previously commented that this remark is bizarre, as no one should ever contemplate backing up one volume on a drive to another volume on the same drive: that’s not a backup but a duplicate, which is just as vulnerable as the original should anything go wrong with that drive.Īpple has apparently been informed of this problem with Time Machine, but hasn’t got round either to addressing it, or to warning users that their Time Machine backup will lose their metadata when restored. Maxwell has described this in detail here.Īpple’s Photos User Guide refers to potential problems with permissions if your Photos Library is on an external drive which is also backed up to that same drive. When Time Machine backs up a Photos Library, it completely omits the database folder within it, where all its vital metadata are stored. At present, only the latter will actually replicate your library in full.
Time machine help for restoring notes on the mac manual#
They fall into three main areas: Photos Libraries, iCloud Drive, and everything else.Īpple’s advice on backing up Photos Libraries is to either use Time Machine, or make a manual copy of the library to external storage.
This isn’t any easy matter to investigate, because of all the variables which do vary between different users, but recent articles by Maxwell have raised several important questions. After all, isn’t that what Apple tells us? Only that’s not entirely correct: Time Machine backs up most of what we want, but is surprisingly forgetful when it comes to some very important files. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Time Machine backs up everything a user could possibly want.
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