Time machine: /Users is on a separate partition

[Almi]

Hi everyone!

 

First of all, lots of thanks to the great community!

 

I have a retail boot132 install on a GA-G31M-ES2L based hackintosh. I used 10.5.6 retail DVD and installed all updates. Everything works like a charm, but Time Machine reveals a bug.

 

The only peculiarity of my system is that /Users is a separate partition that is mounted in fstab as:

UUID=3ECE-myUUID /Users hfs auto,rw

 

TM is set to backup to another internal hard drive. It does back up files in /Users. I can see that by navigating in terminal to /Volumes/TMVolume/Backups.backupdb/CompName/Latest:

 

	   sh-3.2# ls
   .Backup.log		.exclusions.plist	Users  .com.apple.TMCheckpoint	OSX
   sh-3.2# ls Users/
   .CFUserTextEncoding	.localized	.DS_Store	Desktop DB	.TemporaryItems  Desktop DF
   .bash_history   Shared  .com.apple.timemachine.supported	almi  .fseventsd			
   sh-3.2# ls OSX/Users
   ls: OSX/Users: No such file or directory

 

Here OSX and Users are volume names of root filesystem and /Users, respectively.

 

PROBLEM:

When I enter TM, I can go back in time everywhere, except of files in /Users! It shows only the present files.

 

Please help!

[Almi]

I could not fix it so far. Eventually I had to give up with mounting Users partition directly to /Users. Instead now it is mounted to /Volumes/Users, which is default OS X mount point. Then I change my home directory to /Volumes/Users/Almi in System Preferences ->Accounts->Ctrl+Click on my username.

 

It seems that now everything works, including the Time Machine.

 

According to the Apple forums, changing home directory as described should be enough. Although people report that some non-native applications could have problems with that. Just to prevent possible problems, I also created a symlink in /Users, that point to my new home directory:

 

cd /Users
sudo ln -s /Volumes/Users/Almi Almi

 

Hopefully this configuration will be stable.

[shj]

Hi,

 

How do you manage to mount your "Users" partition /Volumes/Users/ ?

Where is your boot partition mounted?

 

I did all the steps as above, My boot partition name is "BootVol", and User partition name is "UserVol"

BootVol is automatically mounted at /

 

So if I do ls /Volumes, i get BootVol instead.

 

 

Shantanu

[mitjam]

I have the same problem with /Users mounted to separate partition and Time Machine restore.

I'm running Snow leopard and the problem persists.

 

Has someone already found a solution. Or the only way to go is changing each users home directory to /Volumes/Users/...?

 

Thanks,

Mitja

[shj]

I solved this problem by mounting to /Volumes/Users as outlined above.

This is achieved without reformatting the disk, and simply changing the mount points.

 

However, one has to be careful before suddenly changing the mount paths. If you do not have the appropriate read/write permissions, you can be locked out of your account forever.

Best way to do this is enable atleast one more Administrator account, or if possible "root", so that you can always log in to the system.

 

Shantanu

 

 

 

I have the same problem with /Users mounted to separate partition and Time Machine restore.

I'm running Snow leopard and the problem persists.

 

Has someone already found a solution. Or the only way to go is changing each users home directory to /Volumes/Users/...?

 

Thanks,

Mitja

[mitjam]

Changing users home folder to /Volumes/Users made Time Machine work correctly for users archives.

I also created a symbolic link for /Users to /Volumes/Users (in any case).

 

User homes are not located directly under /Users folder as they could be ... but I hope everything will work correctly.

 

Shj, thanks for warning about user lockout possibility.

 

Mitja