Just some things I noticed online today.

• First Leopard Update released.  Here is the fix list.
• Quicksilver top 10 plugins.
• Use rsync to emulate Time Machine
• VMWare Fusion 1.1 released.  Release notes here.

One problem I ran into with my new Time Machine setup was that my large virtual machine disk files were aggressively being backed every time they changed.  Since each virtual machine is extremely large (multiple GBs each) and since Time Machine backs up an entire file each time it changes, I was quickly eating up lots of space on my external drive.  Also, since Time Machine had to backup what turned out to be 20+ GBs nearly every hour, Time Machine backups weren’t exactly transparent.  I certainly noticed based on CPU and disk activity that backups were in progress.

Thankfully, there was an easy fix.  As mentioned in the previous entry, Time Machine lets you exclude specific disks, directories, and files from backups.  I keep all my Virtual Machines in "~/Virtual Machines" so I simply added that directory to the exclusion list.

However, one more step remained.  I wanted to free up all the space taken by the virtual machine backups before I noticed the problem.  I opened Finder and navigated to my Virtual Machines directory (actually I invoked Quicksilver and typed "virt" + enter).  I then launched Time Machine (Quicsilver + "Tim" + enter).  From the Gear menu button in the Finder, I selected "Delete All Backups of …" for each of the files and directories I wanted to remove. 

Time Machine will prompt you for confirmation and, if you are not running as a privileged user, will also prompt you for credentials. 

Problem solved.  I excluded my virtual machine backups from Time Machine and freed up close to 100 GBs of space from my drive.

So I finally got around to setting up Time Machine.  I actually needed to get a supported external hard drive first.  I ended up buying the Lacie D2 HD Quadra.  This drive boasts 500 GBs of storage, 7200 RPMs, and USB2, Firewire 400/800, and eSata interfaces.  Setting up Time Machine was as easy as advertised.  As soon as I connected the drive to my MacBook Pro, Leopard nicely asked if I wanted to use it for Time Machine.

Of course I do, thanks for asking.  After accepting, I saw the extremely simple Time Machine Preference Pane.  About all you can configure in Time Machine is whether it is enabled, which disk to use, and to exclude specific disks, files, and directories from the backup (Options button).

The backup started promptly at noon.  I wasn’t around when it finished and I didn’t time it but it did take a while to complete. 

And that was it.  I have a full backup of my Mac and presumably Time Machine will do its job in the background and continue to backup all my files as they change.  The only other thing I did was remove the Time Machine icon from my Dock.  Hopefully, I won’t actually be needed to use Time Machine to restore files very often (even though it will be tempting just to see the great interface).  When I do need to get to it, it is just a few Quicksilver keystrokes away.