Day 1: Time Machine
I was fascinated about Time Machine. Walt Mossberg has already dubbed it as the marquee function of Leopard. I tend to agree, mainly because backing up a computer is one of the most essential processes, yet it is one of the least executed.
Backing up a machine can be an arduous task—it’s long, it slows down the machine, and it can be complicated. Time Machine takes all this out. It is truly the “Backup for Dummies!”All you have to do is to plug in an external hard drive and launch Time Machine. Time Machine will automatically detect the external drive and ask you if you want to make this external drive as your backup drive. Once that is done, Time Machine proceeds to first copy all your files into the backup drive and then it backs up the changed files on an hourly basis. It is basically a “start-and-forget” process—you start Time Machine and you wouldn’t even notice that it is backing up your machine! Do you want to locate a file that you know existed yesterday? You can flip then flip through the backup versions hour by hour! How far back you can save? Apparently it is limited by the size of your external backup disk. Once the disk is full, Time Machine supposedly alerts you that it will start deleting previous backups, oldest first. But before it deletes any backup, Time Machine supposedly copies files that might be needed to fully restore your disk for every remaining backup. One thing that I want to test is the claim that multiple Macs can share one Time Machine drive. But the acid test will be a full restore after a hard disk crash. Personally, slick as Time Machine appears to be, I will take the plunge and simulate a full restore only after I have successfully cloned my machine. According to the developers, Super Duper is not yet fully compatible, but according to Macworld, Carbon Copy Cloner appears to be compatible. This may be the chance for me to reduce the Windows partition I setup for Boot Camp, which I rarely use nowadays.
November 02 2007 06:44 pm | OS
