The Silicon Amanuensis: Apple's Time Machine
Steve Beisner -- November 23, 2007
Apple's new operating system won't change your life or solve the problem of world hunger, but it does have at least one new ability that will help writers avoid hair pulling, teeth gnashing, and anguished screaming. In typical Apple fashion, the computer and software company has immodestly dubbed this new feature Time Machine, but cute name or not, this one's a keeper.
Wouldn't it be great if your computer automatically kept track of your entire hard disk, periodically recording every change to any file and allowing you to recover any document that had ever been on your disk, as it existed at any point in time past? That's what Apples new Time Machine does.
Time Machine, introduced as part of the new Leopard release of the OS-X operating system, turns a whole category of technological headaches into historical relics.
Initial setup means attaching an external hard drive and answering "yes" to the question "Do you want Time Machine to use this drive?" A few minutes after you've set up the program, Time Machine will make an initial backup that may take several hours to complete as a complete record of the computer's entire main hard drive is copied to the Time Machine drive. Thereafter, the process completes quickly, because Time Machine need only record changes.
Capturing file system snapshots is automatic, and there are no complicated options to set up. Time Machine keeps hourly backups of your file system for the last 24 hours, daily backups for the last month, and weekly backups for more than a month ago.
The underlying idea of Time Machine is nothing new: optional software for Windows, Apple, and Linux computers that can make complete disk image backups has long been available. What sets Time Machine apart is its simplicity and ease of use. Furthermore, Time Machine is completely non-intrusive: it all happens without user intervention. Apple's rendition of this feature so useful and easy that one's reaction is likely to be, "Why don't all computers do this?" and "Why wasn't this available before?"
The screen image below shows what the excitement is about. This is the screen which covers your normal desktop when you start Time Machine to restore files, or even just to browse your files as they existed at some earlier time. Against the Star Wars background you see a series of Finder (file browser) windows, one behind another, receding into the distance. The front window is a browser on the file system as it exists now. The one behind it allows you to view your files as they exited at the time of the most recent automatic backup, say an hour ago. As you move back toward the infinite distance, you can browse older and older versions of your work environment.
It's truly a remarkable user interface: you can scroll through your computer's history with the same ease that you scroll through a manuscript in a word processor.
Those of you who have been to any of my workshops on technology for writers at various writers' conferences have heard me say that technology should be simple. Time that a writer devotes to unruly computers, out-of-control word processors, searching for lost snippets of work, etc., is time wasted. By contrast, Apple's implementation a versioned archive is simple in the extreme.
But don't rely on Time Machine as your only backup. You should have off-site backups as well. An earlier installment of The Silicon Amanuensis, Backup Without Tears reviewed the free off-site backup service at Mozy.com. If you're not using Mozy or some less automatic mechanism to produce off-site backups, then you're living dangerously: what if your house was burned, flooded, or blown away? What if you lost all your work? It happens to writers all the time. So try the state-of-the-art plan to keep your valuable work safe: Apple Time Machine for your on-site archive and backups, Mozy.com (or something similar) for off-site safety.
Check Ink Byte soon for the next installment of The Silicon Amanuensis.