Apple doesn't do it first, but they do it well: Time Machine

I really don't like the idea of all my old files possibly sticking around or taking up hard drive space.
On the other hand, this could be quite useful.
I hope there's some way of deleting things so they don't show up in here, so if you delete something large (like a movie), it doesn't stick around.
Or if you wipe the deleted space with the disk utility, it erases this stuff.

I'm sorry. but you interface winers are fools...

I think the interface is very well thoughtout, because it makes old file versions as easy to access and examine as with the normal Finder (compare with the lousy Vista interface used to browse old versions), but at the same time makes it very clear that you are NOT in the regular Finder, but in Time Machine, and that you are looking at old files. Which is pretty important to avoid confusion.

The starry background has a real and functional value as a visual clue, it's far from just eye candy.

I like the interface but i just don't like the buttons on the bottom...

Chris,
That is a great idea...a NAS device that writes straight to DVD.
TimeMachine could backup up data over the network to this unit which writes it to DVD. When the DVD is full it notifies you to insert a blank one. You could then put the full DVD into your archive safe.

I don't know why people keep comparing shadow copy and time machine, they are 2 very different technologies. Shadow copy doesn't exactly help you if your entire drives dies, while a time machine backup can be used on a new leopard install to bring your system right back to the last backup. Microsoft doesn't even say its good for backups, they have separate utilities for incremental and full image based backups in Vista. What its good for is if you accidently hit save when you meant save as and you can quickly roll back on file, time machine can also do this but requires the time machine drive be available which it might not be in the case of for example a notebook.

However the real innovation in Time Machine stems from how you can restore items from inside of applications. Let me give you an example. My father is cleaning out some old emails; a week latter he is looking for a message that contains some pictures from my recent vacation and realizes he must have deleted it when he was cleaning things up a week ago. Now Mail.app and Windows Mail store there email settings deep in folders that my father would never want to look at and current backup/restore systems don't allow for him to easily just grad that one message from the past and bring it back. With time machine he just clicks on the Time Machine icon in the dock while in Mail.app and he can browse using the Mail.app UI, find the message and click Restore and its back right into Mail. This is the true power of Time Machine being able to browse data in apps like Address Book or iTunes or Mail or iPhoto and just just grab a little piece from the past and restore it. This goes far beyond files and folders in the Finder.

I got a copy of Leopard 8 months ago.
I began using time machine as soon as I booted up Leopard. 6 months later, my 300 GB External Hard Drive was completely full with only Time Machine related items. I told it to update only once a week. I am now working to dump old dates to make room for newer ones. This needs to be fixed before Leopard hits shelves.

Shadow Copy is *not* Time Machine. Backing up is only half the deal--something that shadow copy does almost as well as Time Machine. Time Machine, though, is about recovery of information. The fact that you can search through historical records and pull a single record out of the past without leaving your application's UI is something that Shadow Copy can't do. And that's what Time Machine is. It's more than simple UI polish-- it's fundamentally new functionality.

Worried about a muddle of user interfaces?

We have Aqua, iTune's metal, Cocoa's metal, Mail's platinum, Garage Band's wood, Apple's Pro Tools UI, Dashboard....

It's a mess already - he's hoping 10.4 unifies them again and they stop with the ugly ITunes/Safari toolbar rubbish and use the proper Mac OS X ones.

[)amien

shadow copy has nothing to do with time machine. Shadow copy can only do a fixed number of snapshots of a given file sysem even if there's space available. Shadow Copy is just vaporware and never worked the 3 times I need it to work. Shadow Copy snapshots are done by the system at time intervals or manually when the user clicks on the button.

Time Machine works all the time and does snapshots everytime of every file and that's just the beginning. Apple has been silentely implementing Sun's Zetabyte File System that is simply the most powerful file system on earth today. When it is implemented, Windows that today is seen as 19th century legacy product will be seen as an 16th century legacy product.

to me, the thing that apple seems to be doing with time machine and with core animation in general is to move the OS into less of a 2D interface, and make it more 3D. I think time machine is their first step in that direction. while i haven't been too impressed with the images, i do think its a good thing, even if they have some kinks to work out.