Is there a way to use an iPod as a Time Machine backup volume?

do both your iPod and your PC have the same size hard drive? I don't see why not... but what a waste of a good iPod...

it could be an old ipod, I use my old ipod as an HD

It is an old iPod (40 GB). The HDD is larger, but that shouldnt matter. 10 GB partitions on my external Lacie show up as possible Time Machine Devices.

Personally, I use 343 on my Macbook Pro with a 15GB Time Machine partition so that it is always available rather than needing to worry about having the external drive plugged in constantly.

I would be a lot more happy if Apple finally got ZFS working. That would solve so many issues simultaneously.

Of note, ZFS is completely crippled in 343. By crippled, I mean it is using UDF (the Optical Disc format handling Large Bit Addressing) rather than ZFS. And then when I try getting the ZFS Disk running through 321 and then installing 343 on it, I get an immediate kernel panic.

It would look like in this build, ZFS may just be a placeholder. Either that, or a serious bug in Disk Utility is preventing one from creating or mounting it, and the kernel either does not know about it or is looking to the UDF module by mistake.

Could not even get the single boot under ZFS to work as I had done before on 321.

It has been quite a while since I have last poked my head around in there, (have had much more important work things to do than trying to make Apple's ZFS implementation work) but the 6 hours that I put into it the day of 343's release did not yield any useful results.

If there is any new news there, I am more than willing to give it another shot as I now have some free time to work with. Hoping for a new release in the next 48 hours showing Apple's willingness to get back on their normal schedule. Show of good faith and all that when it comes to meeting deadlines.

I am having Time Machine problems (with a normal external HDD). It says preparing to backup for like three seconds, and then it stops.

Anything showing up in the Console? (your log file viewer)

Check it in /Applications/Utility/Console.app

I would save all the logs to a file, clear them and then manually run a Time Machine backup.

Then, all the information stored will come from Time Machine.
Could be helpful in diagnosing what is going on.

Sounds good, thanks. I'll do that when I got back to that computer in about an hour. I should have thought to look in the console first.

Sometimes it is the really obvious things that slip past us.
It happens to everyone.

Ok. Here is one of the console logs. I fixed this problem before, and got the new problem, but I'll post this anyway, I'll post the other one after I reboot and can replicate it.

CONSOLE:

Feb 9 15:57:50 Power-Mac-G5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Starting user-requested backup
Feb 9 15:57:50 Power-Mac-G5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Backing up system
Feb 9 15:57:50 Power-Mac-G5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Target volume is not HFS+ (Journaled).
Feb 9 15:57:55 Power-Mac-G5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd: Backup timer scheduled for Sat Feb 10 2007 at 03:00 AM
Feb 9 15:57:55 Power-Mac-G5 ReportCrash[302]: Saved crashreport to /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/backupd_2007-02-09-155750_Power-Mac-G5.crash using uid: 0 gid: 0, euid: 0 egid: 0

Crash report is attached.


Thanks for the help!

I think that the problem may have been that the drive was fat and not hfs....

That could do it.

Time Machine is dependant on a Journaling file system.
If you want to experience all kinds of fun data loss, try taking your Time Machine volume and disable journaling...
Made that mistake once when I needed to resize my hard disk to make some space for Sabayon.

Disabled the journal, rebooted and forgot to press "C" to boot to the DVD drive, and then found myself with an error message that would not go away stating something to the effect of "Can not read "TimeMachine". Disk Utility will run a Repair on the drive on the next reboot."

In the end, all the backups were there, but could only retrieve them by digging around on the disk in each of the dated folders and try to track the old files down.
Not a big deal because I dont generally need old versions, but it broke the Time Machine frontend.

So, what will the benfits be of a ZFS timemachine? Do you think drives will be able to be converted to ZFS without being wiped?

It may be very possible to "convert" to ZFS, however it could be fairly dangerous.
That, and it would only work if your partition is less than half full.

10.5's Disk Utility has the ability to resize partitions. You would need to shrink your existing partiton, copy all data over, delete the old partition, resize the new ZFS partition back to the full size, and then actually do the installation.

Much more likely that Apple would require an iPod or other external hard drive to do an Archive & Install.