David Pogue at Macworld 2008: Getting started with Leopard's Time Machine

By David Pogue

David Pogue at Macworld Leopard secrets revealed Leopard's new help program Big, juicy Spotlight remake in Leopard Using Leopard's Spaces Icon view available in open and save boxes Getting started with Leopard's Time Machine Featured Books

TRANSCRIPT

This is the way you can have a complete always up to date entire backup without being a nerd. You buy an external hard drive, plug it in, and you get this box that says “Do you want to use this hard drive as your Time Machine backup?” You say, “Yes.” That’s the last of it. That’s all there is, and right now your computer will start backing up everything – your programs, preferences and settings, documents, even Mac OSX, a complete mirror. Not only that, it’s gonna do it again every hour of every day so that you not only can go back to something that you had yesterday, you can go back to a document that you changed or deleted an hour ago.

So obviously if you have a 100-gig hard drive that’s gonna be an awful lot of disc space so at the end of every day on the premise that you didn’t have a crash today it auto deletes all but the last hourly backup, leaving you with just one memory, one mirror of that day. Then at the end of the week it says, okay, this was a good week for you. Nothing bad happened. It deletes all the backups from that week except the last one, and then the same thing at the end of the month. So by the end of October you’ve got whole mirrored backups from the end of September, the end of August, the end of July, and so on.

So I actually don’t have an external hard drive here but I’m sure you’ve seen it. When you want to go back in time and recover something it’s a little bit weird. You open the window that used to contain it and then you put the time machine icon on the dock. The whole backdrop of the screen including the menu bar and everything else falls down like a curtain dropping and you always wondered what’s behind there, right? You always suspected maybe it was like monkeys on roller wheels. No. It’s outer space. What’s the view behind the window, which remains on the screen, is this deep space nebula shot with multiple iterations of this window, the same window going back and back and back and getting smaller and smaller and receding into the distance. Then on the right side is a time ruler, which you can slide through.

You flip through the iterations of this window like index cards until you see the window the way it was before the disaster happened, and there’s even a big arrow button that automatically jumps to the last time the window was different from the way it was right now. Then you just highlight the folder or the document that got deleted or changed by accident, you click “restore”, the curtain lifts again, you’re back on your desktop and you’ve got your stuff back. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Time Machine is also built into three of Leopard’s programs including iPhoto, Mail – anyone ever delete a piece of mail by accident – and the address book if you’ve deleted someone’s address by accident, and it’s really bizarre how these work too.

So you’re in your iPhoto window. Darn; where’s the picture of the blue thing? You just go up to the menu and you say “Browse backups” and this time it’s the iPhoto window that will remain on the screen. The backdrop will fall away and once again you can zoom through multiple iterations of this window until you see the picture that used to be there and restore it. Same thing with e-mail, same thing with address book. Very cool. All of that is in the Apple information. You knew all that. Here’s the stuff that you didn’t know.

Frequently asked questions. Can you back up multiple Macs on to a single backup hard drive? Yes. Can you backup one Mac on to a hard drive that’s being used for other things? Yes. No one tells you that. Can you back up stuff wirelessly without buying Apple’s new time capsule thing? Yes, you can, not an external hard drive on some other computer but another Mac on the network that has free space. You pull it on to the screen with file sharing and then you’re allowed to use that as a backup drive. Can you take your laptop back and forth between home and work and backup on one? Yes, you can use one laptop and go back and forth between two Time Machine backup discs. All you have to do is be sure to click the Time Machine icon on the dock, which isn’t on my dock, and there’s an option there for “Change backup discs” so you specify which one.