Mac OS X Leopard

Time Machine

The most important new feature added in Leopard is undoubtedly Time Machine, Apple's attempt to encourage the vast majority of users who never, ever routinely back up their data to change their ways. Time Machine automatically backs up a Mac's files to a separate hard drive (internal or external, though external is certainly safer and more convenient) or a network volume being shared by another Mac running Leopard. Attaching a drive and assigning it as a Time Machine backup volume is incredibly easy, and once you've set it up, you can essentially forget all about it.

Time Machine's interface looks a bit spaced out, but it makes incremental backups understandable.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of Time Machine is its support for incremental backups. Rather than creating an identical copy of your drive, it tracks the files you've changed and saves those changes on an hourly basis. And grabbing an old copy of a file isn't some complicated job designed for an IT professional; with one click on the Time Machine icon you're in the gratuitously spacey Time Machine interface, which lets you use the Finder (as well as other supported applications such as iPhoto) to fly back in time and pluck out the data you want to retrieve. It really is backup for regular people, and the presence of Time Machine leads to a remarkable change in mindset: we just installed a new version of a program we're beta testing, and realised that if it didn't work, we could quickly roll back to the previous version via Time Machine.

One downside of Time Machine's backups is that they're not bootable on their own. If your main hard drive dies, you need to replace the drive and then rebuild your drive by using the Leopard boot DVD's Restore function or the Migration Assistant utility. But all your files will be there when you're done.

Will Time Machine turn us all into compulsive back-up fanatics? No, because making that backup requires actual storage space, which requires the purchase of a large backup drive. But until online storage is infinitely vast and fast, that will always be an issue. The good news is, Time Machine is simple enough that it really eliminates most of the obstacles that cause most people to bypass backing up their data. If you can buy a big hard drive and plug it into your Mac, you can keep your data safe.