My views on Time machine

One of the cornerstone technologies in MacOs Leopard is called Time Machine. This is one of 300+ new features built into MacOs Leopard. All of the features can be found at http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/

The way I see it, the biggest problem with doing backups is actually taking the time to do it. During a backup you normally can't do anything other on your computer. Most often, you will do a complete backup of your system onto an external hard drive or file server on your network which can take far longer than 60 minutes depending on the amount of data you want to backup. It simply doesn't make sense to back up everything again if only a small number of files have changes since your last back. The other problem is that traditional backups only take place once a week, once every three weeks, every two months or almost never. With time machine every time you connect to your external drive a backup is done automatically in the background. The ideal is having your macbook, imac or mac pro permanently connected to your external drive. Changes to files are backed up every hour and you often don't even notice it taking place.

Because I want to not only describe the technical aspects but want to include some of the emotional aspects of using macs I want to describe the feeling you get from having a perfect backup copy of all your files, all of the time. You do feel a lot safer, you know that changes you make can always be turned back because time machine keeps all of the previous copies of the same file, so all of the changes made can be followed through time up to the present moment, you know that you can take your macbook on holiday without worrying that rain, fire,theft or accidentally dropping the macbook will destroy not only it, but all of your data. You can now safely store all of those holiday photos without the fear of losing all your your important information. I will touch on the ipod with camera connector in later posts since I have tried it myself and want you to know some of the distinct drawbacks to this method. I can just maybe hint that battery life is a big problem when offloading pictures from your memory card to you iPod directly.

If you want to bring back a file, photo or anything else you had on the mac you enter time machine by tapping the icon. It then opens up a number of windows from different times in the past. You can then move back in time to the file you want to bring back. Select the file and tap restore to bring that file back to the current time. You can also restore entire harddrives from a backup if you have a drive failure. To do this you can boot the mac from the MacOs Leopard installation disk.

Another very useful feature is that you can essentially use time machine as a near line storage method. Let me give you an example, if you have taken 1000 photos on your last trip to Cape Town and have already burned the photos to DVD, you can wipe them to free up some space provided that you did connect to your time machine external drive before doing this. If after two weeks you now want to use those photos, it is far quicker to retrieve them from time machine than from DVD. You may be asking why save them on DVD in the first place. Time machine will add new copies of files without touching the old files until it has filled up the harddrive. At this point it will ask you if you would like to replace the oldest backups to make room for new ones. You can decline, but then need to provide another drive to continue using time machine. If you do accept, the oldest backs will be wiped out to make room for more backups.

Time capsule is a very nice addition to time machine. It provides a wireless backup option which is especially wonderful if you are using a mac notebook.

You can find additional information on time machine at
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html