One little detail caught my attention and got me to smile. The ..."tiny clock whose hands move backward" icon in the menu bar is one of those typical charming details where Apple shines. Leopard is peppered with them, as is Apple's other software, hardware, as well as product packaging. I cannot remember how many times Apple made me smile at some charming little detail where Apple's tasteful sense of humour comes through (like when a Mac is put to sleep, its power light begins to throb, at the approximate frequency of human breathing... - the Mac is asleep!).

We could always use guys like Pogue (to drive AAPL stock higher...!)

The problem with Time Machine is that it simply can't work with large number of items to restore. I've lost about 25000 e-mails the other day, and Time Machine would simply crash, hang, or terminate without any messages, when trying to restore them. In the end, I ended up pulling the files out of Time Machine backup manually, from a command line.

And Time Capsule has very little to do with the Time Machine, and its "simplicity" has nothing to do with the device itself. Yes, Time Machine is simple, when it works. But the problem is it doesn't always work.

I use a VPN for work (Cisco), and when connected to the VPN the LAN is not accessable. Time capsule gets disconnected. After a few times of this, Time machine is unable to continue backups, it just hanges at "preparing" for hours without action.
This is a serious flaw, Time capsule should be able to flawlessly reconnect and time machine continue it's work when I disconnect from the VPN.
I am huge Apple fan, but these oversights really urk me.

...it should have worked the way you did it, but obviously the best way here is to go back to Time Machine, select the "Mail" item in your library, and hit the restore key. It's far quicker and less complex to replace a whole Mail file with ALL its included emails than to a comparison between two large mail files.

Anecdotal evidence to the contrary is one thing, but to extrapolate from your experience that Time Machine doesn't work 50% of the time seems a tad harsh.

-dk-

Referring to the guest who has the problems to back up through VPN.
I have also found that whilst 9 times out of 10, time machine works flawlessly, it does hang in the same way as described if the back up process is interrupted.

I now have a twice daily routine for backing up my laptop.
I travel a lot so carry a Lacie portable drive.
I connect through firewire, let TM do it's thing, then eject the TM disc and continue working, repeating the procedure at night.

If, I forget to eject the disc and either my machine goes to sleep or I close it to go out at sometime during the day, and this coincides with a mid stream TM back up, TM will hang in the same way as described.

The only way out is to force a reboot with the on/off button, System preferences also hangs, does not respond to "Force Quit" also restart or shut down does not respond.

While I also love everything about my Macbook and certainly all the new features in Leopard, especially TM, this seems like a bug and I wonder if any other readers have had the same experience?

I asked at the Apple store and was advise to follow the same twice a day process.

I also wonder if the same problem would occur if using Time Capsule?

The help screen says TM should just resume if interrupted, my only experience is that it hangs.

Anyone found a way around this?

Macbook 2.4 GHz 10.5.2, 3 months old.

AndyR

Updating my TC firmware to v. 7.3.1 rendered my existing backups useless. Time Machine was never able to complete another backup after the update until I started from scratch again.

Real kicker is that I still can't use VPN with my TC. Since February of 2007, Apple has suggested users of AEBS to place your client in the router DMZ as a workaround to its awful support of VPN. Like an idiot I bought TC thinking Apple must have solved this problem...nope. I still have to connect using my Sprint Novatel card for VPN.

Apple, why can't you get it right?