Time Machine is temporally brilliant

From time to time I hear a person say that the differences between Macintosh and Windows computers are becoming moot. They’re the same thing, some folks say. Well, they may be very similar, but there are still some very important differences.

One of them is Time Machine, Apple’s back-up software. It is so delightfully well-engineered that they deserve a medal. Time Machine comes with the latest Apple operating System OS 10.5. When you invoke Time Machine, the computer starts to back-up your files on a hard drive of your choice. I have a 1 TB external drive that I purchased to act as my back-up drive. It takes several days for Time Machine to catch up with you, but when it’s done, it just keeps working, writing back-ups of everything you do.

The Time Machine Control Panel allows you to assign a back-up drive. In the Options menu you can declare folders that are not to be included in your back-ups.
And, when the drive is full, something that happens pretty quickly, Time Machine begins by discarding the oldest back-up. All of this is under software control. When it settles-in, you get hourly back-ups for the last day, then daily back-ups backward for a month, and then monthly back-ups until your disk is full. You just let it hum away, making back-ups, and you forget it’s there until that day when you accidentally write-over a file or empty the trash while it contains a valuable file.

When that inevitable event happens, you clutch your chest in terror, then you remember that you have Time Machine, and you relax. The file is still there.

The Time Machine interface puts the back-ups like cards in a space-age deck. When you click on any of them, it jumps to the front. To recover a file you click on it, and hit the Restore button. In seconds the file is saved in a new folder on your current desktop. This software is uncanny in its operation, and as far as I can tell it’s foolproof.
Time Machine displays successively older folders of files, and when you click on its space-themed window, it jumps back in time. There is an animated timeline on the right wall of the computer also, which lets you go back an hour or a month, and then it presents the files as they were saved on that day. To restore a file, you click on the file, and hit the restore button.

This in contrast to other methods of backing-up files that I have used over the years. I used to make nightly DAT tapes of my files, using an effective but not entirely reliable program that would write only the files that had been modified to the DAT tape. On the few occasions when I needed to read a DAT tape, it would shuffle through the old files – serially – and more often than not would tell me that the file I needed was unavailable because of a tape read error.

Time Machine dispenses with all this grief, and its work is immediate. You get your file back. Now.

And, once in a while it will save you from humiliation. One of my students saved an assignment on a server at the university last week in a folder appropriately titled Short Term. This particular folder is emptied every night at midnight. I planned to copy the document out of Short Term onto another server, but I forgot.

The next day when I woke up (I saw The Hangover last night, and it was nothing like that!) I remembered the student’s file. In horror I called our technician and asked him if he runs Time Machine on the departmental server. “Of course!” was his reply. In about 20 seconds I had the file, and life went on without a hitch.

Apple also packages a hard drive inside their wireless Time Capsule device which will back-up one or more computers using its internal drive. The software is the same.

I’m all for this time travel stuff!