Mac OS X Leopard - Time Machine I was planning to leave my appraisal of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's Time Machine feature until the end, but necessity has just forced me to look at it in depth straight away. Put simply, if it wasn't for Time Machine, you wouldn't be reading this article. Earlier today, I experienced one of about three kernel panics I've …
Your entire OS fails in under 2 weeks, it takes 2 failed attempts to restore and a complete re-install of the OS to get back up and running and this is a resounding success how? Yes you managed to recover all your stuff eventually, but that is the point of backup. On just that feature you give Leopard 95%, completely ignoring the fact that Leopard should not have put you in that position within such a short period of time. How much are Apple paying you for this review?
PS:
My Vista X64 Business has NEVER crashed on me or caused me to do a forced shutdown in the 6 months I have been running it. Neither have I experienced any of the problems other people have reported such as the slow copying to network.
First of all, there is a way to force a backup whenever you want. Just right-click on the Time Machine dock icon and there's an option to "Back Up Now".
But there are a lot of compatibility issues with Time Machine at the moment, just check out this Apple forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1197927&tstart=0
I found this because, guess what, it doesn't work for me with my G5 PowerMac and (brand new) Western Digital My Book combo. The backup just craps out with some unknown error and never gets to complete.
Looking at the error reports, there is no real pattern to the problems. All sorts of people with many different types of kit are having a range of different issues.
So although Time Machine is a great idea and the interface is brilliantly simple, I can't see that it can be relied on as your sole backup solution just yet - even if it works for you at the moment.
Maybe the forthcoming 10.5.1 will address some of the problems, who knows.
There IS a back-up now button - right click (or control-click) on the time machine dock icon. Does this mean it gets 100%?
Also, I'd like to thank apple for this feature. I switched almost all of my relatives (whose PCs I get lumped with supporting) over to mac, which has cut the amount of work down by 80% or so. Time machine will cut it down even more, and I'll be able to stop reminding them to make backups! Ah, more time for actually doing stuff instead of fixing stuff!
Now, go fix the UI stuff you uglified mr. jobs.
So if we forget about the fact that your closed system (closed OS, closed hardware) after a matter of weeks not only crashed but shat itself so it wouldn't even boot, there's a fundemental issue here isn't there...
"Only to have the process fail a quarter of the way through."
It didn't work as it should have done.
Essentially Time Machine is an hourly scheduled backup to removable media. The same as Windows and Linux can do. I honestly can't see what the fuss is all about... have Mac's honestly never had a automated backup application?
And don't reply with the flicking back through to older versions of the same docs - sure there's apps for Linux that do it and Windows has done it for years.
find <DIRECTORIES> -type f -mmin -5 -exec cp --backup=t --parents "{}" /tmp/backups/quickies/ \;
Put that in as a cron job that runs every 5 minutes (or whatever, just make the -mmin clause match the cron period), and Bob's your uncle.
The directories to protect should be just a list separated by spaces. Home directories are a good place to start; on Linux there's no real need to protect the system.
This works with minor changes on OS X too.
I've been using this for years on Linux and Macs. I also run a job that deletes anything from the backup folder that's not been accessed for a month.
Not so pretty but at least I didn't have to wait years for a company to do it for me on a whim.
Err, your new O/S pasted your system to such an extent that you had to completely reinstall it, you don't know why, and it took a few attempts to restore from backups? And this is still a positive review?
I thought the whole point of Apple kit was that by controlling the hardware and the O/S this sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen?
I'll stick to Tiger, thanks, at least until a couple of dot-x revisions have passed. As useful as Time Machine may very well be I can't afford to have my machine explode like that for no discernible reason.
OS X 10.5 is stunning, absolutely brilliant - and it is still in early days of its introduction to a big new world.
Over on one of the forums the reported message rate of all OS X 105 posting (faults and praises) corresponded to 0.005% of the 2 million sales in the first weekend. Now that is worth thinking about for sure.
As a relatively new to Mac person the other things (apart from TM, Cover Flow, ... ) are the more mundane things like data transfer rates. What does that mean?
Well one thing is 25 MB/s to an external USB drive.
Transfer rates, if there is a lot of data to shift, between devices is awesome with the usual advantage that moving stuff does not eat into CPU cycles.
But no OS is perfect and the first few weeks into "Hello world" really does mean some stuff will be identified (good and bad).
Now the biggest problems are: MacDrive? Parallels? VMWare? Will I won't I?
How can you possibly give 95% to a piece of software that you couldnt get to work the first two times you tried it, ate up hours of your time, and you should never have had to run in the first place.
This is possibly the most biased review I have ever read in my life. Yes I'm sure your delighted that you managed to recover all your data, and maybe thats why you think its invaluable but you can't honestly say it deserves 95% after all the problems you have had.
Maybe the reviews are broken again and you actually meant to give it -5%.
Chris
Gee, for just the price of buying an extra device you can make use of a backup feature. Lovely.
Why not just have a RAID 1 system in the first place if you're going to run two drives?
And if you want to be able to look at previous editions of files or backup copies, why not have a system like Server 2003/Vista's Shadow Copy which is seamless, invisible and requires no extra hardware.
Or, if the OS fails, Windows has had since XP the ability to roll back before updates, boot last known good configuration and so on.
Hardly seems something to crow about!
"My Vista X64 Business has NEVER crashed on me or caused me to do a forced shutdown in the 6 months I have been running it"
Oh aye, and what about all the previous versions of Windows that you have run, and that have crashed, constantly and with no obvious cause? How many times have you seen the delight of the "Windows is starting for the first time" screen. Anyway, you're missing the point in that it worked (sure not fault free but still seems relatively painlessly).
I guess you just like lampooning Macs; fair enough. But when your current version of Vista does die a death, please do post on here just how easy it was to restore everything, then you'll have something to compare.
First off, I have seen Windows kill machines on install several times over my career, as I have seen Sun boxes DOA: hardware isn't 100% reliable nor can it ever be.
I got Time Machine working on a Mac Mini last weekend and I'm quite happy with what it's doing, although I think I am going to spend some time getting a profile correct: it seems that the average backup is about 40Gb, and the default profile says that it will take a full backup weekly until the drive is full. I suspect that we are going to hear some wailing in a few weeks when A.N. Leoparduser's nice new 300Gb drive has run out of space.
Time Machine is a great addition to any OS, simple to use and as Tony has found, great when something goes wrong, but I think it's also going to generate a lot of discussion and hacking tips among those of us who want more control over it.
Irrelevant tosser more like.
I was hoping in vain that this story wouldn't descend into "My OS is better than your OS", but too late, it already has.
Based on your enormous sample of 1, we can now safely say there are no network copying issues in Vista. Brilliant.
My mate has got the same car as me and he has crashed his, so I reckon I'd better sell mine.
My copy of VMS hasn't crashed since 1936. Because I haven't got one.
Time Machine is a classic example of Apple getting themselves and their sad fans excited about something that the rest of the world finds trivial and has been doing for decades. I had a similar app running on an old Vax 15 years ago.
Meanwhile, Mac users have to put up with unmaintainable hardware and a selection of software that's second to all.
Dreadful company, dreadful products, deadful fans.
Read your so-called article through to the end. Was still hoping for the whole thing to end with some sarcasm, but it didn't.
Will you please share your pocket-money earned by astroturfing with us; us who spend time reading through a marketing-in-disguise ?
Anyone deserving the title 'journalist' ought to know his stuff and keep the proper distance. Nothing to be added to what was said earlier, except that the idea behind ZFS (which was supposed to be the underlying file system) was not implemented in 10.5. You had better lambasted Apple for stealing hours of your time by selling you a sub-par filesystem that tends to leave the data on the drive in an undefined state. Provided of course, that there was no drive failure. Your endless experiments rather demonstrate a problem of the system, when a restore hangs twice and a fresh install is unavoidable. After a simple BSOD.
To those people who seem to think that you can write a one-line cron job in Linux to do the same thing as Time Machine.. well, good luck with that.
What you probably don't realise is that when TM runs it's is informed by the OS which files have changed since it last ran, and it backs up those, and only those, files. Running 'find' every hour will probably result in your disk thrashing for a considerable portion of that hour - whereas my TM activity takes about one or two minutes, with very minimal CPU involvement.
And no, Windows Shadow Copy is not the same thing either. TM makes clever use of hard links in the backup set, so that each hourly backup can be browsed from any normal file manager tool (eg the Finder) and appears exactly like a complete backup in it's own right. They should have called it 'SpaceTime Machine' for the way it apparently squeezes 24 backups a day of your entire hard drive onto a disk that might be no bigger than the source.
More details on the tech behind this can be found in Ars Technica's review. I suggest you read it before post any more inane 'Linux can do this' comments.
I love how it's enabled by default. As a brand new OSX user I've been impressed with how most things just work - and Time Machine is a great example of that.
It makes me wonder why the Firewall is defaulted to off though. Still, I only have minor quibbles so far. This seems easier to navigate and use for a new user than, say, Ubuntu or even Windows.
It's not my OS v your OS. It's a case that the "review" was 95% for Time Machine. But it didn't bloody work until the third time around.
The other points I think are relevant, in that both Linux and Windows have offered this feature for a long time. XP since 2004, and Linux for years before that.
Essentially Time Machine is doing a full backup, and then incrementals in the background every hour if you have a removable hard drive.
The fact that something so very simple didn't even work properly the first couple of times is just shocking - and giving it 95% just highlights the huge bias that this "reviewer" has when it comes to this OS.
And to be fair, when someone is doing a review of an OS, and 2 weeks in the OS shit's itself and then the new restore features doesn't work properly then you need to expect people to come up and say WTF? 95% on a feature that doesn't work first time - and you only used the feature because the OS (which is closed sourced) COMPLETELY DIED on the closed source hardware (so to speak) which is overpriced in the first place.
You don't expect any comments about it?!
I won't even mentioned the firewall that is turned off, BSOD's if you have an application installed, the firewall that when you tell it to disable all connections it lies to you and of course the piss poor quality hardware used even though you pay a premium for it.
So yes, expect comparisions. I would expect car mechanics to discuss motors of all sorts - regardless if they service them on a regualr basis.
It's called research and comments. Check the title of this page.
And finally, not too sure that personal attacks are really justified Evil Graham. Or is that Ignorant dickead?
I had a 221MB zip file of about 250MB. It was on the C: drive of my friend's Vista laptop.
WinZip was not installed.
I expanded the zip file (compressed folders method) and tried to copy one of the folders from there onto the Desktop on the SAME laptop. This isn't even copying between computers or over any sort of network - this is from the harddrive to somewhere else on the same harddrive.
Vista said it would take 4 days and 6 hours to complete. It started copying the data at 55 bytes/sec and never got above 68 bytes/sec.
In the end, I had to put the zip on my Mac and activate file sharing on the Vista laptop, so I could copy them at a reasonable speed (in the Mb/sec range).
I've experienced the slow file copying in VIsta, and let me tell you, it f**king aches.
How easy it is to infuriate Apple fans just by pointing out that their beloved systems are far from perfect.
@Danny Traynor
I stand corrected, the score was just for Time Machine. But why does a feature need a 2 page review? Surely the OS should be graded as a whole and completely failing in such a short period of time should deduct mega points.
@James Robertson
If you read the article fully, it did state that the Apple hardware test and booting from DVD confirmed that everything was ok. That points to an OS problem to me.
@Evil Graham
I never claimed that my experience with Vista meant there are no problems, but after months of listening to the Apple mob spouting how crap Vista is, nobody can get it to work, buy a mac they don't have these kinds of problems etc it balances things out slightly. Also, have you noticed recently that more people are beginning to post that they haven't had any problems either. I suspect that a lot of the previously reported problems are due to 3rd party bloatware (HP,Acer,Sony) and also from people who have run away from it after 5 minutes use crying 'It's so different from XP, I don't know what to do'
TIme machine doesn't take a full backup each time, it does that once (which will take 40gb). The next time, it will backup anything that's changed, and put links to the first backup for anything that hasn't changed. The backup folder LOOKS like a complete backup, and reports that it contains 40gb of files, but it probably only takes a few MB in reality.
For comparison, I have about 70gb of data being backed up to a 320gb disk - there must be 30+ backup folders now, each reporting 70gb of files, but I have about 120gb free (and there's a lot of other stuff on the disk, not just time machine!)
In practice, it'll keep hourly backups for the present day, then (if i remember right) daily backups for the last week, weekly backups for the last month, then monthly backups until it runs out of disk space (at which point you start losing the oldest backups).
And for everyone that doesn't "get it" - sure, backups are nothing new, and backup to an external hard disk isn't exactly perfect. But the key to this is that the vast majority of people DON'T backup, and find it difficult to figure out what they need to buy or do. A lot of mac users have an external hard disk already, or will buy one to use time machine. And all they have to do is plug the disk in, and click ONE button. That's it - they have a good backup routine established. The fancy 3d interface and stuff is over the top, but it's kindof fun and it's easy to understand. No grey windows with lots of options.
I.e. - people will ACTUALLY USE it! How many people use windows backup?
OK, steering clear of the whole Vista vs OS X vs Penguin OS debate, surely the point here is that while it did (eventually) work, the reviewer by their own admission had 3 attempts at restoring said machine. Two attempts using what I presume (not having tried it) is the standard method which failed on two occasions (no warning before starting saying it can't be done this way, therefore if it crashes mid-restore then this software is faulty) before having to do a full format, re-install, then restore data.
Backup software that "works" like that should not be getting 95% in a review, irrespective of platform.
it's true that two restores failed, whatever part of the OS that's down to, it's not as good as Windows restore for fault fixing (which I have hardly ever had to use in XP and never in Vista as of yet). If it was a hardware problem I don't see why it would be gone with a reinstall of the OS, it's clearly something that's been corrupted in the system files, which clearly aren't restored fully using Time Machine. While I can see the benefits of it, it's not THAT good, and it IS a feature that's been in XP for years (was it in SP1 it was added? Can't remember if it came with the standard install or not.), and this is NOT a my OS is better than yours, if it was it could turn into a massive argument (as usual), but, based on the ONE feature that has been reviewed, the XP restore was implemented years ago and is miles ahead of Time Machine. If anyone's got a good reason why that statement is untrue go ahead.
to ever have objective discussion about the merits (or not) of an operating system without it turning into a slanging match between Microsoft and Apple preachers???....no, don't think so, unfortunately.
I run Vista, and it does crash, and I am looking to get a Mac sometime in the near future - I expect that it will also crash on occasion - but hey, that's software for you - get over it.
BTW, my dad is bigger than your dad ;-)
"find <DIRECTORIES> -type f -mmin -5 -exec cp --backup=t --parents "{}" /tmp/backups/quickies/ \;"
And you think the average user (you know, the ones that this feature is actually aimed at) would know how to do something like this?
Jesus. The above comment is by no means the worst offender on here, but the number of strawman arguments being puked up in these comments is just staggering.
The clown who thinks that 6 months crash-free with Vista is somehow a valid comparison to *anything* probably also doesn't understand what things like "mean time between failures" *really* means. There is no such thing as a fault-proof hard drive just like there's no such thing as a fault-proof OS, and I've lost count of how many times a clean XP installation has borked itself for no apparent reason, and has to be reinstalled all over again. Your computer *will* crash at some point, and you *will* lose data at some point. The only point of importance is how easy it is to get your data back. Judging by the reviewer's experiences, there was more going on here than a straightforward crash; possibly more than one fault, hence the need the reinstall the OS. Not a trivial issue by any means, but the point is that the data was safe and he did indeed get his machine back.
This is why Time Machine is such a big deal. No, it's not a revolutionary concept (I don't recall anyone claiming that it was) but what *is* pretty unique is the implementation which, for the average user (see definition above), it makes it harder to *not* use it than to use it, which boosts the likelihood of data recovery by orders of magnitude that most other products simply don't manage.
I didn't notice anything in the article about how Time Machine _really_ works. I assume that it's a file level copy with date/time stamp that is all slapped on an external device and has an interface to this device that shows point in time 'snapshots'. What I didn't notice was how Time Machine deals with files which are locked for access or which change while they are being copied (a classic problem with backup of databases in particular.) With VSS in Windows, you can instruct apps to quiesce in order to create a valid copy of their files, with NetBackup you have open file management, but as a catchall you also have the ability to run pre and post backup commands and instruct your apps to quiesce or extract, likewise with Networker. How does Time Machine do this? Can it do this? It is really important that people who run Time Machine realise that it may have limitations.
Can anyone enlighten me?
"Or is that Ignorant dickead"
No. It's "dickhead". And it's "Mister Dickhead" to you.
The point I made is still valid, you can't seem to post anything about an OS feature without some sort of docile flamewar erupting. It's not Slashdot for fuck's sake.
I reckon you could write a Perl script to generate these comments pages. One bloke says Vista is brilliant, honest, the next says Mac users are smug, another one says Windows crashes all the time. Next guy can do it all with a shell script, next guy says it would never happen on VMS, blah blah. Just remember to add some random spelling mistakes and you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference.
We know already. Give it a rest.
It is sooooo completely obvious that you nay sayers just don't get it.
It's not about the backing up. It's about RESTORING from backup. It's been reported that only about 4% of people regularly backup their data because it is a complete pain in the ### to find and restore the files you want.
Backing up is easy. Restoring is HARD.
I can pretty much bet that most of you posting don't and haven't actually backed up your data regularly. I'm sure you'll post here that you do but I expect you to lie and say you do.
As for RAID guy. Yeah right. Like everyone is going to setup a RAID system on their computers. Have you seen the expression "ROFL". I'm sure you have.
"My Vista X64 Business has NEVER crashed on me". Again. ROFL. Vista X64 which you've had for HOW long? ROFL It WILL crash. Let us know then how easy it was to restore everything. Or how about restoring a file or folder. Let's have you walk your mom through it. I DARE you to videotape your mom restoring something for you. Believe me we'll put it up on YouTube where we can laugh about it.
As for his hard drive having a problem? I started supporting PCs in 1983. I long ago lost track of how many hard drives have had formatting problems on PCs. Even in the last two or three years. Then then I actually do this for a living. The tech department I work for supports about 10,000 people. You?
Most of you that have posted need to actually use different backup systems and restore individual files, folders, and full restores. Then you need to do the same thing with TimeMachine. Not read about it but actually do it with all of them. Maybe then you will get a clue. Then walk non-techie family members through it and see which one is easiest for them to use. I'm pretty sure I know which one they will choose. Cheesy graphic effects and all.
-----
The people (family and friends) that I support have never backed up regularly. When I've set something up so that they can (to backup tape, external drive, or to shared areas on other computers around their house - whatever), they fail to insert that next tape or CD.
Let's so they did actually insert the next tape or CD. Now they have to tell me where to find the stack of tapes or CDs and then I have to have them tell me how long ago they knew they had a file and I spend a bunch of time restoring it for them.
Not any longer.
I preordered Leopard and it arrived about 11:15 on D day which is over six hours before you could buy it in stores.
The only problem I've had was from having previously back in the day installed Logitech mouse/keyboard drivers which used APE. It wasn't long before someone on the Apple message boards already had a fix. Bad Logitech. Not bad Apple.
No other problems.
I have a 750 gb external HDD partitions unequally into three partitions. Two of the partitions are shared so that my other two Macs can backup to TimeMachine while the HDD is connected to my main iMac. It works great.
Once TimeMachine finished I purposely duplicated a folder and clicked on "Backup Now" by right clicking on the TimeMachine icon on my Dock (which I love). It took a very short time to backup that folder. I then did "the TimeMachine thing" as my sister calls it and very easily restored the folder by going to the parent folder, clicking on TimeMachine, typing in the folder name, and up it pops and the restore popped my folder and data right back.
If you can fall down, you can restore files on TimeMachine.
I then took my iMac and external HDD over to my sister's house. She is very computer phobic. She never strays outside her web browser, e-mail, Nisus Writer, Quicken, and iPhoto. She is one of the worst in backing up her files and misplacing backup disks/tapes.
While she watched I deleted the folder again. I then walked her through restoring a file without me touching the computer.
"Cool" she said.
We went onto Apple's website and ordered Leopard for her. It arrived about five days later. While we were waiting for it to arrive I took her to a local Fryes and had her buy an external hard drive. I partitioned it into two partitions, backed up her hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloaner (CCC) then used my own Leopard install disc to install to upgrade her iMac AFTER making sure that APE wasn't installed on her computer.
No problems with the install and no problems with her computer since.
I've repeated that process 16 times since then. Not one Mac (several were six years old) failed to upgrade properly. But then again, I just made sure that all were backed up externally first (CCC) and that APE wasn't installed.
Two problems are fixed.
1) I no longer have to worry about their backups.
2) If they do have a question, it is now much easier with all of us having Leopard to remotely connect and see what they need help with.
And restoring files? They actually purposely delete files, contacts in their address book, etc, just to have the fun of restoring files. When was the last time you read that?
Fraser,
Ars Technica did a very detailed review of Leopard (warts and all) and the Time Machine part of it is here:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14
Basically Apple have modified the Unix system underneath to allow hard links to directories, something that was (I think) never done before (at least in Unix).
They also added a notification system so that apps can register and get callbacks about various types of filesystem events. Put them together and you can make Time Machine-like stuff.
The article explains it much better than I can, of course.
I've got Vista, XP, OS X 1.5, SuSE Linux, Mandrake Linux on various machines, and to be truly honest with you they're all as good/bad as each other.
I've no idea why people get so worked up about all this - nor why people don't expect bugs in software - even with the most diligent testing something always slips through.
Why not just give TM time to settle in. And no, I'm not advocating releasing applications just for people to find the bugs, but realizing that no one team can find every bug.
Familiarity always leads people to miss areas, and having others out in the rest of the world look at it is only achievable by releasing it.
You can be assured that the first unfamiliar user will do something you didn't expect and it'll all go bang!
But I will say one thing having spent time "fiddling" with the Vista, XP and Linux backup solutions, TM is by far the most transparent, and it's nice just to forget about it all.
I'm primarily a windows IT consultant who just started playing with macs. I can categorically say that until Vista Business/Ultimate there hasn't been a built in backup system that let's you do per-file restores as well as full image restore from bootable media.
For the latter the only option was 3rd party - V2i protector/symantec bex sys recovery/etc; or ntbackup with a reinstall, re-patch and restore from ntbackup.
Unfortunately in Vista that functionality is not available in Home basic or Home Premium (which is the market where i thought most pc's would be backed up as, barely any corporation backs up their pc's but rather ensures no data is on them in the first place.
So timemachine can do both, and for my personal machine i think it's great. HOWEVER, that it didn't restore from the boot cd for the reviewer is very bad! I successfully did so on mine, but still it should work EVERYTIME. Also, TimeMachine is not a robust solution for locked and open files, particularly databases of any kind (like email dbs, or various app's dbs *cough* aperture *cough*)
So i think TimeMachine is a great feature for home pcs, but that's it. I guess it's lucky that that's where Apple is pitching this.
Anyway, feel free to blast me for liking time machine... i mean it's not like i've worked with countless backup systems from ntbackup, over backup exec, TSM (which rocks my world), etc, so what do i know
The implementation is good technically (well, 2 out of three attempts failed but I see your point) - but it's only good if the end user KNOWS to plug in a USB HD. The OS is great in setting it all up - better than Vista and much better than Linux - but no matter how easy it is, the end user MUST plug in some external hardware.
To do this, if your not into computers at all - just want it to work - then the feature is about as much use as every other standard bit of backup software.
There's nothing special - it's an DIFFERENTIAL backup that automatically kicks off when an external HD is plugged in. The single instance storage feature (so it looks like it's from the same backup set) is a really good idea - and one of the best bits of it. Can't give too much credit as other platform and apps have been using this for years.
Point is that yeah, it's pretty cool. But only if the user knows it's there. If they don't then it's useless. So the argument of comparing it to Vista is null - if a user wants to backup they will ask a techie friend of google it. Once that's been done, both Vista and OSX implementation are equally easy. (Three clicks in Vista as opposed to the 1 in OSX - although you can fully configure it in Vista so it's pretty balanced out)
Given the competition out there, plus the 2 out of 3 failures on the restore how can the author possibly justify 95%?
"Time Machine is a classic example of Apple getting themselves and their sad fans excited about something that the rest of the world finds trivial and has been doing for decades. I had a similar app running on an old Vax 15 years ago."
I think perhaps you've missed the point of what El Reg are doing: a review of a single feature of an OS. Commentary that follows is then likely to be about opinions of that feature.
"Meanwhile, Mac users have to put up with unmaintainable hardware and a selection of software that's second to all."
Ignoring the obvious observation that your attempt to take the discussion way off-topic implies you haven't understood what we're talking about...
Macs are POSIX compliant, OS X is a certified UNIX and OS X is the only desktop OS on which users can run OS X, X11 and Windows applications simulataneously. So what on earth is the software that "Mac users have to put up with" second to? A subset of the same software run on other machines?
"Dreadful company, dreadful products, deadful fans."
Bait much?
OK, sit 100 average punters down at identical computers, half with Time Machine, and half with RsyncX (also a GUI for rsync) and give them 5 minutes to work out how to back their machine up (and start the process)... then give them another 5 minutes to work out how to restore something (and to actually do it)... I'll bet a tenner that most of the people using TM will accomplish both tasks, but I'll bet a BAZILLION pounds that NONE of the RsyncX'ers (average users, remember) will have gained the confidence in RsyncX's interface to be sure that they have successfully backed their computers up, nor will they have the confidence to be sure how to restore something, in the same period of time.
Therein lies the real value of a feature like Time Machine.
Note that I'm not trying to claim that average users could *never* suss out RsyncX, I'm just saying that the immediacy of TM gives a confidence in, and therefore an incentive to do what is, for most people, a complex work of voodoo.
It took me about 8 minutes to cron up a job that would make a backup copy of essential data, then commit all of that to SVN. That means that I can use a lovely web interface to view all the history of all of my important files.
Plus it is completely portable, tuneable, and reliable.
And it works nicely even on boxes that lack a display.
And it works over the network to my file server.
And I've never had any OS related issues that make the backups necessary at all.
Sounds to me like the author was just so relieved at getting his data back that he had to immediately bust out an account of his near brush with disaster. That's 95% of relief, fellas, not objective review.
And Mac fanatics, yes, we all get that you love your shiny toys that "just work" third time round. Apple are just doing what they do best which is blaring trumpets and firing cannons to announce an over-simplified feature that's been around for years. Time Machine is a full + incrememental backup system and, accessibility issues aside, is nothing new. Credit to the interface, for sure, but it's nothing new.
And besides, Volume Shadow Copy has the ability to perform granular, block level copies of your volumes the moment changes occur. This means only the changes to your files are recorded the moment they happen, not the entire files at predetermined intervals. This reduces the backup space needed, the time needed to copy them and the disk-writes needed to make the copies. Modify files on your Mac several times within the hour and your backup is the copy taken during the last sync. With VSC you open it up and pick the exact version of the file you wish to revert to, even if it was changed seconds ago. Now THAT'S a Time Machine in my book, but as usual Apple give something quite rudimentary a fancy name and a cute backdrop and suddenly all the dumb-arse Mac users are hailing it as revolutionary.
Yawn!!
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