Hello all. Made a little discovery today that may be of use to others, so I thought I would share!

2 weeks ago I purchased a Lacie 500GB External drive and connected it to my Macbook. Straight up Time machine kicked in and asked if I wanted to set it up as the Backup drive for Time machine, and proceeded to back up my entire system. I thought to myself, This is cool, no more manual backups, no more lost files.

However, when i attempted to explore the time machine and do the cool scrollback thingy, it just sat there, looking at me, clicking arrows did nothing and on the right it just had "today" and "now".

Strange. So off I went to google the issue. nothing! lots of nice articles praising the application, and video presentations showing it working, but no clues as to why I could not get it to work. I was thinking perhaps it needed to be installed for a minimum period before it would work.

Was about to post a question here, but, seeing as I paid for Applecare thought I would call them and ask the question.

Long story short: Systems preferences>sharing> at the top there is a box with Computer name: If this box is blank, time machine will not work!

Gave it a name, restarted the Macbook and now I have Time machine working as it should.

Hope this is of help to someone.

Good tip.

Rather odd though that you machine didn't have a name in the sharing panel. As far as I know (well in Tiger) Mac OS X will automatically allocate a name for your machine along the lines of '*your name* *your machine model*'

For example my machine is called 'Bob's iBook G4' (well technically it's called 'iBook G4' and it is shared as 'Bob's iBook G4')

Oh BTW, I don't think 'time machine' and 'share' need exclamation marks, kinda sounds funny when you say it out aloud.

Time machine is great, but I've noticed that my WD drive that I am using for it is showing considerably less capactiy than it actually has.

ie I pull p the info window and it says capactiy 180gb, 5gb free.

It's a 320gb drive.

I would be investigating that, mine shows capacity as 465.44 Available 425.26 for a 500GB Drive.

If you move a big set of files around (ie music collection etc) you can lose your Timemachine backups.

My Timemachine partition (on a bigger drive) is 300Gb and believe it or not I got a message yesterday that it was too small to copy the hourly backup.

Umm. What? Its 300Gb.

My setup is a bit complex but there are 2 hard drives in my G5 and a couple of external hard drives plugged in. But I just back up with Timemachine my 2 main partitions - the bootdrive with the users file and the main storage drive which has photos and music. That usually adds up to 146Gb.

I've been trying to consolidate my 57Gb photo collection of 27k photos. (My partner likes to take multiple photos which are 5Mb each. It all adds up.)

I was moving around the 57Gb file. And another one about half the size. There were even a few copies of all the photos on one hard drive for a while, or big chunks of files moved from one folder to another, on the main storage partition.

The latest Timemachine backup then took up most of the 300GB disk.

All old backups for the last few weeks were overwritten by that single backup.

And there was not enough space for even a second backup round which was about 75Gb extra space required.

In any case your oldest backups get deleted first. And you could be left with just recent (hourly) copies. If I had stuffed up with the photo files I might not have been able to restore them.

I guess the moral of the story is if you move very big files around you can wipe out most of the Time machine backups. This would be a bigger problem with a smaller hard drive for Time machine.

The way around this is to turn Timemachine off while you do this sort of serious housekeeping.

And there is a purpose for Superduper after all.