Ready the Time Flux Capacitor!
I’ve gone out today and bought myself (Amongst some bits of stationery) a new USB hub, and a new external hard disk (320GB for £49.99 - can’t complain).
The reasoning behind this is simple - I need a new USB hub to connect the mountain of devices I have to my laptop without running out of ports, power or both. I opted for a nice 4-port USB 2.0 hub (Powered) in order to be able to connect and juice up my various bits and pieces via a single port. Since I’ve still got a mini 1.0 hub, I reckon that 9 ports should be adequate for most purposes. If not then I’ll invest in a 7-way hub - but that’s getting silly.
On the hard disk front, I wanted it to use as a backup device - but no mere rsync backup device! No dodgy 3rd-party backup device! No, this was going to be a Time Machine backup device!
Apple deserve some kind of award for the sheer idiot-proofing that has been put into Time Machine. To start backing up my machine, I had to:
- Attach my external hard disk (Although secondary internal ones or RAID arrays work just as well.
- Click one button.
That’s it. No configuring, no selecting backup rotas or exclude folders, no selecting if I want incremental backups or full backups… just attach and one click. This alone makes Time Machine a winner in my eyes, since backups are traditionally a pain in the ass for anybody who doesn’t understand a bit about what actually goes on. However, Time Machine doesn’t stop there - it not only makes backups easy, but it makes them pretty as well. To begin with, you jab the rather nice looking Time Machine icon on your dock.
After doing this, when your hard disk has accelerated to 88 miles per hour, you are whisked away into some futuristic-looking world in which all your Finder windows are disappearing into the distance. They represent states of your machine, made automatically by Time Machine. Every hour for 24 hours into the past, then after that every day for a week, and even further back in history are weekly snapshots of your entire machine until you run out of external disk space. Since Time Machine uses some very clever incremental methods, unless you’re throwing around large video files every day this could be a while. Of course, if you are throwing around huge video files every day then just attach a large RAID array, or hook your machine to an OS X server with a SAN. Time Machine works just as well.
A couple of big, reassuring arrows let you skip backwards through time (They skip straight to the last change that occured, so if you haven’t altered a folder for 3 weeks you’ll go straight to 3 weeks in the past) to see what your folders, email, contacts, calendar etc. looked like in bygone days. Once you’ve gone back you can go forwards again, but at present you can’t see what will be on your desktop next week. This would really help me with some assignments, but we’ll ignore that shortcoming for now. There’s also a big, reassuring timeline down the side where you can flick through dates without just stabbing in the dark. Once you find what you’re looking for, be it an old version of a file or something you deleted, then you select it and hit the big, reassuring “Restore” button. You and your file are whisked to the present day, and dumped somewhat unceremoniously back into reality. I was expecting at least a set of flaming tyre tracks (Perhaps an addon?). Finally, there’s a big, reassuring “Cancel” button for when you keep clicking Time Machine by accident.
So, that’s about it. Idiot-proof setup, automatic backups, and dead easy recovery of anything from the past. You can also use your Time Machine drive to do a full system restore in the event of a major problem. You can even browse the backups using any normal disk browser, as they’re stored as a combination of folders and hard links (Kinda like symlinks), so any folder contains your entire hard disk(s). One lacking feature is the ability to backup external pendrives, although external HDDs (Other than your Time Machine drive of course) do work. However, remember you need at least as much space for Time Machine as you have things to back up - plus some for history - so if you have 1TB of attached hard disk space you’re going to need a good 1500GB of backup to get a decent timeline going.
Overall? Big and reassuring. It’s simple, powerful backup and retrieval that does what it says on the tin without baffling users with hundreds of options, disk quotas, reminders and the other crap which usually comes with backup software. Time Machine should actually improve the number of Mac users who backup their machines by no small amount, if only due to the fact that it’s marketed as more of a time-travelling device than a backup solution. I still want my Mr. Fusion battery pack though.
Tags: Apple, backup, hard disk, hardware, hub, Leopard, software, Time Machine, USB