Time Machine: Yea or Nay?
Sven-S. Porst, a graduate student in Gottingen, has written up an interesting take on Leopard's Time Machine. He gets into serious technical detail -- more than I can follow -- and has a few harsh things to say both about Apple as a company and the Time Machine feature. He's overall positive about the project and the idea. After all, anything that gets people to back up (and his distinction between user data and the OS is a great one) is good. And I agree with some of his criticisms, such as iPhone-like features in the Time Machine Preferences and the non-standard UI that's flashy and is going to look dated -- no pun intended -- soon enough. Do you use Time Machine, if you have Leopard? If so, how? If not, why not? Would you like better integration with applications, and if so, how? Personally, I'd like an easy way to use it as revision control for text documents. |
Comments (1)
Yes, I use Time Machine on the machine I have Leopard. I manually use psync on a Panther machine.
I'm not sure what you mean by "how." Do you mean how do I interact with the backup? So far, I've only only played with the Time Machine interface to browse what it is doing... I've not use any application interface to it nor have I restored any files. I've also poked around in the backup with the command line. Another "how" is I backup an internal drive to a USB connected external drive.
If you want to see what Time Machine is backing up, I recommend latest-time-machine-files.pl on www.entropy.ch.
I don't think I'd want to use it as a version control system (although one can manually diff files). I use CVS and Time Machine backups up my CVS installation. If you are using the Time Machine drive for version control, failure of that drive will result in the loss of your archive.
Posted by Edwin Arneson | March 29, 2008 4:11 PM