What's the connection between a complaint about Time Machine's silent exclusion of critical data and Time Machine's missing support for removable drives?
Yo dawg I heard you like backups so I made a backup of your backup on your backup.
The idea here is that Time Machine is generally not useful on transient drives that come and go, thus for each time that you plug in the drive Time Machine would have to re-scan the entire drive looking for changes, to then back those changes up to yet another external drive. Time Machine is meant to protect the files on your computer, not those on external media.
Do I agree with that? No, I think I should be able to specify that Disk A should have a Time Machine backup on Disk B, and that Disk A and B are stationary to my desk, but most people don't need that. There is no requirement for that, people want to backup their main hard drive to an external so that in case something goes wrong their data is safe.
The authors complaint seems to stem from the fact that Time Machine can't find a drive to backup to (which BTW, Time Machine will warn you about every single day that it is unable to backup), probably because he spent an awful amount of time partitioning his drives in weird ways with weird names, and copying stuff back and forth thereby probably getting all drives tagged by Time Machine as not viable for a backup location.
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Personally I haven't had any issues with Time Machine. I've got it setup over iSCSI to an OpenIndiana host and to a local 1TB external drive and all is well, haven't had any issues what so ever with it no backing up data, and restoring has been a breeze in the past.
