Time Machine: Just in the Knick of Time
Time Machine is one of the—if not the—killer features of Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard. Basically, all a user must do is attach an external hard drive, and every hour Time Machine makes a snapshot backup of your system. The beauty of this software version of a Flux Capacitor is if your hard drive fails in your Mac, you can restore your system. You don’t lose all your movies, photos, and music. Photos especially are important, as they are irreplaceable. I hope that you make regular backups of those at least, even onto optical media.
The next great thing about Time Machine is the fact that you can recover individual files from time periods past, even if you’ve deleted a file. For instance, you trash and delete a presentation that you thought you were done with. Three weeks later a friend asks you if you could do that presentation for their organization. Crap, right? No. Just fire up the Time Machine and get up to 88 mph! You can go back three weeks and pull that one presentation back to the present.
This came in handy for me last night. I opened iTunes, and someway, somehow, the library data file got corrupted. iTunes couldn’t remember how I organized all my music! And since I have been using iTunes since v. 1, I have a lot of playlists that would take me hours or even days to recreate. Well, I opened up Time Machine and browsed back about 3 hours, to when I know iTunes was still working just fine. Restored. Presto! iTunes wasn’t puking all over itself anymore.
Apple, kudos to you for making Doc Brown’s technology not just something of the movies.
If you want to watch a funny ad about Time Machine, go ahead and click on the picture above. Enjoy!
Wow Chris, Time Machine really was worth it’s weight in gold for you there. Glad to hear restoring things was painless.
I got my LaCie external HD last week and it’s constantly plugged into my iMac to carry out the updates every hour on the hour. I must admit if it wasn’t for Time Machine in Leopard then I may well have shirked my back-up duties. Glad there’s an easy way to keep me backed-up without me having to do all the remembering :)