Time Machine

Ever save a document only to suddenly realize that you just overwrote something you meant to keep? Have you ever opened a folder only to discover that what you thought was in there was no longer there? Have you ever installed a utility that somehow wiped out almost everything? Have you ever decided to do some routine housekeeping in your computer’s address book or old emails only to find out days later that you inadvertently wiped out the address or confirmation email of your biggest client? You get the idea. If you have ever lost something, have had your hard drive crash, or just deleted something that you wish you hadn’t deleted, you’ve also probably wished you had a time machine to take you back in time to reclaim what was lost and bring it back with you into the present. Well with Apple’s upcoming Time Machine, that’s exactly what you’ll be able to do.

One of the most talked about features in Apple’s upcoming operating system, Mac OS X 10.5, also known as Leopard is the built-in backup tool called Time Machine. For Mac users, Time Machine is big news: It marks the first time Apple has bundled any sort of backup solution with its operating system. ( Apple’s .Mac service includes a basic consumer backup tool and the service is available only to subscribers of .Mac—at a cost of $99 per year).

Time Machine is a step ahead of competitors because it’s designed by Apple as a backup tool for the average computer user, meaning that it is very simple to use, with virtually no management or oversight needed. With Mac OS X Leopard and Time Machine, not only can you back up and preserve everything on your Mac — including priceless digital photos, music, movies, and documents — without lifting a finger, you can go back in time to recover anything you’ve ever backed up.

Unique interface

This is not a typical backup application. When you need to access a backup of any file, folder or item tucked away inside a Time-Machine-aware application, you simply select the appropriate window (such as a Finder window of the folder containing the items you need to recover) and then click the Time Machine icon in the dock.

The window you initially selected remains on display but with two arrows (backward and forward used to move back or forth through each backup) next to it and with translucent images of the window disappearing into the background of the screen. Each translucent window indicates a previous-generation backup of the selected folder. As the interface implies, you move backward or forward through the files on your computer based on time.

This approach not only looks like something out of a science fiction movie but it is also incredibly intuitive and easy to navigate. Even the best backup solutions rely on an interface that is separate from the operating system. By incorporating Time Machine into Leopard, Apple retains the same basic interface. This means the user doesn’t have to navigate through an alien file structure. There’s no extra navigation except backward and forward.

Its not just files- Back up everything

One of the smartest concepts that comes from building in Time Machine at the operating system level is that Apple was able create Time Machine APIs that developers can use in individual applications. This means that an application has access to past files, configurations or chunks of data—and users won’t need to leave that application to access lost, changed or deleted items.

What is truly remarkable is that you don’t need to be concerned with where the files are stored. For many applications, a majority of users don’t know where to find the files anyway, so with traditional backup applications, they wouldn’t be able to restore them. That’s because until now, backup tools have worked only at the file level. This integration truly makes Time Machine paradigm shift in the way users relate to backups.

Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard makes a complete backup of all the files on your system. That includes your system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, documents — everything you keep on your Mac. Backups are stored on the external device by date so you can browse through your entire system as it appeared on any date. And that’s what makes Time Machine different from any other backup application.

All in all, there is a great deal of reason to be excited about Time Machine. It will truly offer users backup abilities that have so far been limited primarily to larger organizations—and it will do so at only the cost of storage space. More important, it will offer a uniquely easy-to-use backup solution, one that users will be able to access without needing to really think about complicated configurations that have until now been part of traditional backup applications. The fact that this powerful tool will be included free with Leopard puts it at the top of the list of changes coming to Mac OS X.