OS X Leopard Preview: Time Machine
Back Up Your Entire Computer Automatically
Apple recently released some of the specs for OSX Leopard. OS X Leopard will feature many new features including Time Machine,designed to backup files automcatically.
As a self proclaimed Mac dork, and a Mac journalist I tend to visit Apples website constantly. This week Apple released some of its plans for its new operating system OS X Leopard that is due to be released to the public next year. Many of the planned features of OS X Leopard are simply improvements upon the existing features in OS X Tiger. Apple does however make some notable additions to the operating system as well.
Lets take a look at one of the new features is OS X Leopard: Time Machine
Time Machine
Apple has added an automatic back-up system to OS X Leopard. The system will ask you the first time you add any additional hard drive if you want to back it up, and then will take care of all of the back ups on its own. You can navigate through your files by date and recover everything you have ever backed up, even if you deleted it.
One pretty cool feature is that you can go back and look at a snapshot of what your desktop looked like on a particular day.
I'm not sure how I feel about Time Machine. Don't get me wrong, backing up files seems like a fantastic idea. I am one of the few, one of the proud, who have managed to successfully crash my Mac and would have been a much happier camper if I had backed up all of my system files prior to accidentally removing the operating system.
I don't like to some extent how well the files are backed up. On one hand it's fantastic you'll never lose anything ever again. On the other hand...you'll NEVER lose anything again. Sometimes I press the delete button for a reason, and I would prefer that those files not be backed up and become assessable to others who may find their way onto my computer.
Since OS X Leopard has not been released yet I obviously haven't tested the feature to see how it would operate and how easy it would be to restore files you would rather be lost forever. It seems like a pretty obvious drawback to automatic backups of all your files however.
