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You have failed me for the last time, Time Machine!
I recently purchased a Synology DS420j RAID chassis.
The TL;DR is that this beast is a 4-bay RAID chassis loaded to the hilt with tools to make building redundant disk arrays a snap.
The first thing I did was point my MacBook Pro as well as the Mrs.’s newly purchased M1 Macbook Air. Time Machine backups at the shiny new memory-alpha NAS.
(Yes, I assigned it the hostname of memory-alpha. Welcome to Geekland).
And promptly forgot about it.
And that was a mistake.
Guess what?
A month later, the Mrs. couldn’t find a Keynote presentation she given last fall to a virtual writers conference. A talk she is slated to present later this year.
Nothing via Alfred. Nothing via Spotlight. All our tools couldn’t find this one little presentation.
“Enter Time Machine,” I said! And so we did.
And so we couldn’t find anything. Or at least we couldn’t find anything PRIOR to the setup of memory alpha.
You see Time Machine works through the magic of hard links.
Hard links are files that when copied, only copy references. Not the contents. Copy a file 50 times…still only one “copy” of the file. But 50 different records in 50 different folders. Hence, nicely structured but without wasting any disk space.
Hourly backups running on top of a RAID chassis built on Linux Volume Management, and you are in backup Nirvana.
That’s what is was SUPPOSED to be.
The Mrs. was giving me the Evil Eye, consigning herself to the fate of having to recreate a slide show.
And I was giving Time Machine the Evil Eye for failing what was supposed to be simple.
Only it started back with cold, lifeless disregard.
Until the Mrs. pulled out her previous solid state external drive. “What about here?”
I snatched it from her hands and cried “maybe?!” with exuberance.
(Okay, it wasn’t QUITE like that. But it adds a little action ehh?)
