Time Machine is one of several new features that was introduced with Mac OS X Leopard. Time Machine has been talked about a lot as it’s a huge feature to be built into an operating system. Time Machine is a backup program, but it’s not just any old backup program. Time Machine does its job extremely well, and the program itself is very simple to understand, and can literally be setup and working in under a minute.
Time Machine does require and external ha drive to backup to, but that’s it. When I got Leopard installed, Time Machine was sitting in the dock waiting. When I plugged in my external Maxtor hard drive, it mounted and I was asked if I wanted to use this hard drive with TIme Machine. I hit yes, and everything was setup. No further configuration was needed.
Time Machine appears to just do a straight copy to the external hard drive, then just update it with what has changed. The first backup took about 10 minutes because 9 GB worth of data was being moved over to the external hard drive. The next backup was much smaller because I hadn’t added any huge files to my computer.
Time Machine does hourly backups for the past 24 hours, a daily backup for the past month, and weekly backups until the external hard drive is full.
I mainly use a laptop, so I was a bit concerned about how TIme Machine would act once the external hard drive was removed. Much to my surprise, nothing happened. TIme Machine saw that the hard drive had been removed, and just stopped doing the backups. Once I attached the hard drive again, TIme Machine switched back on and continued to backup my data.
One thing I have noticed is that TIme Machine will not backup while the computer is running on battery, even if the hard drive is currently attached to the computer. I’m guessing this is to preserve as much power as possible so that the computer can stay on longer while using the battery.
When you wish to retrieve a file, all you have to do is click the TIme Machine icon in the dock. You’ll then be taken to a screen with a Finder window and a time line. You can then look for your missing file. Once you’ve found it, you simply click Restore to restore the file back to your machine. That’s it. Quick and easy data recovery with just one click. You can also access the files straight from the hard drive if you wish.
I am completely impressed with TIme Machine. I will still do a backup to DVD every now and then to just be on the safe side, but with this new OS X feature I don’t have to worry about backups nearly as much as I use to.
