(photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Steven Combs)
I’ve always known it’s important to backup regularly and often. Ever since Leopard came out with Time Machine, it’s made it easy for me to do just that without having to think about it.
A couple of days ago, something weird happened with my hard drive, and I had to reinstall Leopard after wiping my hard drive clean… Yes, you read that right… wiped the hard drive clean!
Thankfully, I’ve allowed Time Machine to backup my computer. It does an hourly backup in the background as long as you have your backup drive hooked up. After reinstalling Leopard, all I had to do was click on a bubble that said to restore my computer from a Time Machine backup, and viola! I’m back!
I can hear all you PC devotees making mock gasping sounds saying things like “I thought Macs were perfect! What do you mean you had a problem?” I will be the first to admit that Macs aren’t perfect. I just like using them. But how many PC’s come with a backup utility that makes it so easy to restore all your data after having to wipe your hard drive clean?
The moral of the story here: Backup, Backup, Backup and often! You never know when you will need it.
I'd love to hear more specifics on how you're using Time Machine…
Posted by jonathan | May 15, 2009, 4:46 amYou just plug in an external USB hard drive and it works. That's it. Leave it plugged in and it does an incremental backup hourly.
Posted by Brian Jones | June 12, 2009, 1:49 pmah, the beauty of it!
Posted by Henry Zonio | June 12, 2009, 3:31 pmI mostly just let it run in the background. I've used it a couple of times to retrieve something I inadvertently deleted. This is the first time I used it to restore all my data. It was really easy once I reinstalled Leopard. There was an option to restore from Time Machine. I clicked it, and that was it!
Posted by Henry Zonio | May 15, 2009, 5:09 am