Time Capsule

If you are *not* a member of:

* Intelligent Systems
* Scientific Visualization and Computer Graphics
* Fundamental Computing
* Software Engineering
* Distributed Systems 
* Artificial Intelligence

you will have to get in touch with me (remco wouts) first before you can use this Time Capsule service.

On your mac choose Finder->Go->Connect to Server(⌘K). In the Connect to Server dialog, enter:

afp://turing13.housing.rug.nl.

Connect and provide your credentials (p-number and password). They are send encrypted to the server. You will be presented with an empty share named Time capsule for <your name>.

If you successfully mounted your Time Capsule share, you can select it as the backup disk in the Time Machine System Preferences dialog. You should see your share and a few other disks on the network (ignore those). Selecting it will prompt you for your credentials once more. You can unmount the share from the Finder now. You can backup more then one computer on the same share. If you need more then the default space provided for then you will have to get in touch with me. YOu can also backup your computer at more then once place (eg. at home and at work).

You may want to use the options button to exclude certain directories from your backup (Music, Pictures and Videos perhaps). I strongly urge you to add:

* ~/Library/Suggestions   #database with web suggestions, changes continously
* ~/Library/Download      

Also useful is the option Show Time Machine in menubar.

The first backup will be a full backup and it will take quite long (throughput approx. 70-80MiB/s for a gigabit connection, slower over WiFi). The Time Machine System Preferences dialog will give you an optimistic prognosis of the time it will take. Just let it finish. Once setup Time Machine does hourly incremental back-ups and they are swift enough. Take note that laptops will not be backed up automatically by Time Machine when unplugged. You can of course start a back-up by hand once in a while.

Mac help can tell you how to restore items backed up with Time Machine. It is also possible to mount your share on another mac and use it to copy files back and forth. Better maybe is to use your homedir for that.

If you really think backing up is slow, try:

   $ sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

It may do the trick if you have very many small files to backup.