The Mac Experience : Time Machine
I wasn’t expecting to write my next post on Time Machine this early but a little *mishap* over the weekend prompted me to start writing about it. Time Machine is one of the new features in Leopard that allows you to backup your Mac simply by plugging in an external harddrive and letting it run in the background.
You see, I bring my Mac to work and occasionally I copy some of my work-in-progress back home to review. What I would usually do is mount my network drive onto the Mac and copy entire folders to the harddrive. It didn’t occur to me however is that when you copy entire folders in Leopard, files that are already in the existing folder gets removed. So yeap, you guessed it, I had overwritten an entire folder which had some important files that I was working on.
Immediately I thought to myself, “Can we really turn back time with Time Machine ?” Luckily though I have been running Time Machine backups since the second day I received the Mac. I originally intended to keep a longer log of backups to write a post on the Time Machine feature.
I hooked up my backups to the Mac and entered the Time Machine.
As you enter Time Machine, the first thing that catches your attention is the smooth transition into the Time Machine mode which replaces your desktop with a time line view of your currently opened application, in this case Finder (Mac’s equivalent to Windows Explorer) against the backdrop of floating space. Yeap, the outer space with spiraling galaxies in the distant (corny yes? I know).
I knew I lost the file somewhere in my Documents folder, but I can’t quite recall the exact filename. So I typed in part of the filename in the search bar (file names have been changed to protect the innocent :P). Hmm.. no results now for obvious reasons. What do you do next ? You go back in time.
Along the right side of the screen are two directional arrows that allows you to move between the time of your backups. I clicked on the Back arrow and what Time Machine would do is trace back the history when a file with a similar name existed.
Voila… sure enough it found the file. So I highlighted the file, and clicked on the Restore button and Time Machine brings it back to the present time. And that is all to it. Easy and fuss free. For years I have tried various backup solutions for Windows but none could match Time Machine’s simplicity and ease of use especially during the backup process. In the end I never actually kept a good backup copy of my PC’s content and over the years I did have my share of unrecoverable mishaps like above. With backups this easy to use, who wouldn’t be compelled to start backing up their Macs on a regular basis.
More information about how Time Machine works:
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review
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