Time Machine - Part I: Is it as good as Apple wants us to believe?

ZDNet ^ | October 29th, 2007 | by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

[Swordmaker]

Over the past few days I’ve had quite a bit of hands on time with Apple’s latest OS - Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard.” Rather than rush out a review of the OS I’ve decided to take my time and take a look at individual aspects of the OS. I’m going to begin with the feature that I’m most interested in - Time Machine.

Check out the Time Machine gallery here.

Time Machine is Apple’s answer to the problems associated with backing up data. The idea behind the utility is to make the process as quick, simple, and as painless as possible. The easier the backup process is, the more likely people are to use it and the safer their data will be.

Rather than waffle on about Time machine, I’m just going to cut to the point. Is Time Machine as good as Apple wants us to believe it is? In a word, yes. My experiences with Time Machine so far lead me to conclude that it’s not just good, it’s brilliant. It’s fantastic. It’s what I wish every backup tool was like.

So, why am I thrilled with Time Machine? Well, if you press me for specifics, here are the reasons why, in my mind, Time Machine is an absolute winner:

• First, it’s easy to use. I’m pretty sure that some power users will think that it’s too easy and that there’s not enough control over what’s backed up, but in my mind simplicity is a good thing. The simpler the backup process, the more likely it is to be used. The greater the complexity, the greater the chance that important files are missed and the greater the chance that users will get bogged down.

• Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Time Machine isn’t a system killer once it’s running. My main worry about having a backup tool running hourly was that I’d have to break off from what I was doing hourly and wait until the backup had finished or live with a system that was somewhat unresponsive while the backup was being done. With Time machine this just isn’t the case. The effect that it has on the system (and remember folks, I’m using a lowly Mac mini for my tests) is pretty close to negligible as to be unnoticeable. If the performance is this good on a Mac mini, I’m sure that Time Machine would fly on a more robust system such as the MacBook Pro.

• Finally, it recovers gracefully from problems such as the backup location being switched off mid-backup. Brilliant!

I’ve yet to fully test Time Machine’s restore feature, but if it’s anything as good as the backup facility, it’s going to be a total winner. I’ve carried out some initial testing (I’ll post my findings later) and what I’ve seen so far suggests that Time Machine is the best backup tool that I’ve ever used – I wish that there was a tool that was as good for Windows (there isn’t, I know, because I’ve tested dozens).

Thoughts?

[Swordmaker]

Review of Time Machine in OSX.5 Leopard... PING!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[smith288]

I so want a MacBook Pro and im a VB.Net programmer.

OSX is that nice to me. A little bit of VMWare, Parallels or bootcamp and im set.

[Vermonter]

Just finished installing Leopard with no problems. Unfortunately, I can’t try out Time Machine as my external disk has too much data on it and Time Machine wants to reformat it ;-}

I pre-ordered from Amazon and had a delivery date of 10/31-11/1. I was pleasantly surprised to have it delivered today

[afnamvet]

Leopard is running great. Taking me quite a while to check it out. Very pleased so far.

[GRRRRR]

I would like to be able to tell it to back up once a day or once a week.

Then, still keeping it simple tell it to back up iTunes, iPhoto and “My Documents” and leave everything else alone...OR...do the full Monty once a day or week...

I can do that on LaCie’s back up software...maybe I’ll go back to it...

Time Machine IS REAL EASY tho, set it and forget it, but I don’t like having an entire 500 gig external HD used for this purpose.

G

[Terpfen]

Swordmaker, I'm surprised you haven't posted John Siracusa's Leopard review yet. Lots of in-depth detail there, particularly regarding Leopard's base technologies.

[Terpfen]

Time Machine allows you to specify the frequency of backups, so you’re set there.

Also, no one’s forcing you to use a 500 GB drive exclusively for Time Machine. They DO sell lower-capacity drives... or, why not just partition the external drive into a 100GB partition for Time Machine, and a 400GB partition for storing files?

[Terpfen]

I accidentally posted a duplicate comment. Can this be deleted?

[Swordmaker]

Time Machine IS REAL EASY tho, set it and forget it, but I don’t like having an entire 500 gig external HD used for this purpose.

Partition the drive.

I would like to be able to tell it to back up once a day or once a week.

As for the backing up on a limited schedule... that defeats the purpose of Time Machine. Let it do the entire backup and then after that it only backs up stuff that is changed... you don't do an entire backup all at once after the first time.

[Swordmaker]

Swordmaker, I'm surprised you haven't posted John Siracusa's Leopard review yet. Lots of in-depth detail there, particularly regarding Leopard's base technologies.

Hadn't seen it yet... will do...

[GRRRRR]

My back up is about 390 gig, lots of video and digital pics.
I’m not really complaining, that drive is really just a ‘spare’ anyway...I had nothing much on it anyway...

...how do I specify the back up frequency? Haven’t seen that in preferences...

Thanks!

[Amadeo]

I installed my new Intel iMac with Leopard on Saturday. No problems, looks cool. Ran Time Machine or tried to.

Time Machine made a copy of every hard drive in and connected to my machine. Then it stopped. Error message said that Time Machine failed because of an indexing error. I can find no way to restart the process, do it over, anything.

I went to the Apple forum on Time Machine and there were 26 pages of people with all kinds of problems, including my own.

No solutions. I love my Macs and have for years, but Time Machine is a dud so far.

[Dick Vomer]

If I get Leopard do I just load it on top of my current OSX or do I need to reformat and do the whole Monty?

[BlazingArizona]

I so want a MacBook Pro and im a VB.Net programmer.

Good choice. Whenever you're about to do something risky in your .NET image, use the Snapshot function. If you trash your "machine", it's far easer to restore the image than to rebuild a physical Windows machine.

[itsahoot]

Time Machine IS REAL EASY tho, set it and forget it, but I don’t like having an entire 500 gig external HD used for this purpose.

A 750 gig external drive can be had for $224.00 at Costco, so what is the beef? Probably cheaper than a software package and drive that you are currently using. Get used to the idea of having Terabytes of data, which will require lots of storage for backups. Next big item for homes is a large sever that runs seamlessly and entirely unnoticed by the home user.

[GRRRRR]

Yep, Christmas is coming!!

I actually have 1.75TB of HD storage between my iMac and my XP box...

I really wasn’t complaining y’all!!

[spower]

Check out SuperDuper! by Shirt Pocket Software. An outstanding backup program that lets you “clone” your system into a bootable drive. After the first backup, it can be set to only backup changed files.