Apple Time Machine

Time Machine is a newly introduced utility of the Mac OS X operating system that performs two different types of backups. First it creates incremental backups of all your files, settings and applications and second, it saves snapshots of how your system “looks” allowing you to go back and see how your system looked on a specific date.

The name Time Machine suits this tool’s features perfectly, as it takes you back in time to a past snapshot of your operating system, so if you delete something, screw up your system or add something that isn’t working as it should, you can always “go back in time” to 1 hour before you messed it up and pretend that nothing happened. Also, let’s not forget it’s sleek look.

Time Machine was designed to work with an external hard drive, which can be easily set up with just a few clicks, once activated, Time Machine will create a full backup of your system (this can take several hours on large systems) including system files, and from then, it will start creating incremental backups every hour.

In order to save space, Time Machine keeps the hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for the last 30 days and weekly backups for anything older than 1 month. Time Machine includes two tools to browse through backups, Cover Flow, which will take you to a specific date or Spotlight to search across all your backups. It also includes a file verification utility called Quick Look to verify the contents of the file before restoring it.

Time Machine is also a very useful tool when it comes to migrating from an older Mac to a new one, as you can use it’s Migration Assistant to copy portions of your old system from the Time Machine backup into the new one or you can even restore your entire system at Mac OS X install time in your new Mac (there’s an option to do so from the Mac OS X Install disc’s utilities menu).

Time Machine does also work very well with Apple’s Time Capsule, which allows you to back up your Mac wirelessly, as opposed to using an external hard drive connected to the local Mac.

Now we’ll wait for the next step, a Time Machine that can take us into the future and show us what will Mac OS XII look like.