backuptime-machine
I hear a lot about the good aspects of using Time Machine, particularly the fact that it's so easy to use that people actually do backups!
What are the downsides to using Time Machine compared to other contemporary backup programs? My particular interest is the disadvantages of using it in a (semi)-managed environment i.e. at a university.
Time Machine backs up an entire drive/partition/volume unless you specifically remove files and folders under "Options". All User accounts are included unless you uncheck them in Options.
All of this info is available in your Finder Help menu.
Sounds like the permissions are "wrong" or rather the owner is. Click on the folder, press Command+i, in the "Sharing & Permissions:" section (on the bottom) and check if it shows your new user-account on the MBP as owner (first icon) and if the privileges are "Read & Write".
Probably it will show a different user as owner. You could then try to fix the permissions by running Disk Utility, selecting you OS X partition on the left and click "Repair Disk Permissions" - but maybe this won't fix it, then you have to do it using the Terminal.
Maybe someone else can elaborate on that.
Edit 2011-12-18: Ok, I'll try myself:
Something I didn't know yet but found now looking for an easy fix:
From Troubleshooting permissions issues in Mac OS X
Note: In Mac OS X 10.5 and later, while started up ("booted") from the Mac OS X 10.5 installation disc, a user's home directory permissions can be reset using the Reset Password utility.
resetpasswordCopied from Reset a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Password
I didn't try it myself, but hopefully this should reset/repair your home directory permissions.
Maybe even better solution using Finder in normal OS X:
1)23, make your new user the owner, apply to enclosed items
Easiest way, if you're not afraid of the terminal:
Assuming your new user is named harmen
sudo chown -R harmen /Users/harmen
This will make you the owner of everything inside /Users/harmen
Read more here
Good luck.
Best Answer
Here are some of the limitations you have to accept or mitigate if you choose Time Machine:
Time machine requires an apple specific HFS+ filesystem to store backups.
The backup isn't bootable.
The backup doesn't record differences inside a file. Large (database) files with tiny changes make each incremental save longer and move more data. This also can eat up storage space faster if these type files are not excluded and potentially backed up another way if they can't be regenerated after a restore (like mail stored on IMAP servers)
It must be an external drive or an official apple network destination like TimeCapsule or Mac OS X Server to be a supported by Apple.
It will delete backups according to the official scheule ( hourly backups combine and expire after a day. Dailies expire after 31 days. Weekly backups can be deleted if there isn't enough space to contain the estimated size of the next backup. In odd cases or if there is a bug, you could end up with all the history gone an one copy of the last backup.
The destination volume must be larger in size than the boot volume.
Once you are aware of these limitations, it's fairly easy to work around all but the first limitation with some planning and/or extra software / hardware. The HFS+ format for storage is pretty inflexible with no realistic mitigation or workarounds.