If you're like me, you probably spend a great deal of time using your Mac. From checking email, working with photos, surfing the web and paying bills to writing posts just like this, my Mac serves me well in so many ways. Using it every day as I do, I tend to create a massive amount of files, photos, emails and all of the other items that go along with daily Mac use.
The items that are created, modified and used every day are very important. So, to make sure I have access to them and that nothing bad happens to them, they need to be backed up so they're safe no matter what. But even though I know these files, folders and more need to be backed up, how do I do it in the most simple, effective and least time-consuming way?
Fortunately, there are several solutions available to Mac users to help ensure that their precious data is preserved. Most are simple to use and all provide an automated backup solution that once set up, doesn't rely on the user to make sure it works -- it all happens automatically on a particular schedule.
But which solution to choose? Here are the three simplest, cheapest and most reliable backup solutions for your consideration:
Posted Apr 9th 2008 8:00AM by Mat Lu Filed under: OS, Airport
As we noted when the latest Airport Extreme Base Station firmware shipped, Time Machine now seems to recognize USB hard drives connected to the AEBS as valid backup locations. Was this feature added deliberately? Well, Glenn Fleishman over at TidBITS took the trouble to ask Apple about this and he reports that they told him that this is an unsupported feature (and not much else). This is unsurprising given that Apple never made mention of the feature connected with the firmware update (though it was originally promised before Leopard shipped). Fleishman himself even speculates that it was turned on by accident.
So what's the upshot? Apple is offering no support for using your AEBS this way, and so if you have a problem you're pretty much out of luck as far as they're concerned. Further, considering that there have been reports that the Airport Disk can be unreliable, it's probably not a good idea to depend on an Airport Disk and Time Machine for your only backup.
Update 9 pm ET: Our comrade David Chartier from Ars Technica points out that the 7.1.3 firmware itself may not be necessary for the new functionality to work; he says he tested a 7.1 AEBS with a machine running Time Capsule & Airport 1.0, and Time Machine was able to see the remote disk. Other readers have reminded us that the disk must be formatted as HFS+ with journaling, and you may have to mount it in the Finder before Time Machine sees it. The freeware TimeMachineScheduler is disabled by this update, comments note.
Update 6:45 am Thursday:More comments point out that if you take a locally-connected Time Machine drive and attach it to an AEBS, you will be starting over with new backups (because the remote backups are stored on sparseimages, not as folders). Something to keep in mind if you already have a long backup history -- you might want to use a different drive.
Sometimes the fixes are subtle and quiet. Once TUAW reader Peder downloaded today's Airport updates and ran the utility, he noticed a new version of the Airport Extreme firmware queued up and ready (v7.3.1). When he installed and rebooted his AEBS -- which happened to have a USB hard drive hanging off of it... well, let him tell you:
After downloading the latest Airport-update I checked for updates for my AirPort Extreme. After upgrading to version 7.3.1, Time Machine recognised the attached USB-drive.
If this is a reproducible result -- this means you, everyone, go ahead and start testing this firmware! -- that means that the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't Time Machine to AirDisk feature of Leopard has finally arrived. Sure, the Time Capsule is a one-piece solution and quite economical, but for all the AEBS owners out there who have been waiting patiently, this would be a very nice bit of March madness indeed. [Response to "just-a-guy" below: Remember, this is the Airport EXTREME only; the Express doesn't support AirDisk at all.]
Seeing the same results as Peder? By all means let us know. He was kind enough to send us a few screenshots, see below.
Apple has released updates for Time Machine and Airport, giving us three update reboots in three days. The update improves Time Machine compatibility with Time Capsule and offers some fixes for AirPort drivers. I don't, at this point, see any indications of the rumored Airport-Extreme-as-Time-Capsule abilities, but I'm assuming that will require an Airport Extreme firmware update.
Let me tell you something about people from Brooklyn: we are, by nature and environment, edgy risk-takers who live life like we're driving a Maserati down the PCH. Or a Camry up the BQE. Anyway, you don't want to mess with us -- and specifically, you don't want to mess with Mike Solomon, a creative director who's apparently got cojones the size of Jonathan Ive's awards cabinet.
What did Mike do that earns him the title of Mac Jock Extraordinare? Faced with a weekend on-site video editing project that would require 20 GB of space and only having 10 GB free on his laptop, he didn't bow to the conventional wisdom -- send a production assistant to Staples for a new 500GB drive, or weed out his Downloads folder. No, he decided the best way to free up the needed space was to out-and-out delete his 65 GB iTunes library, the media addict's equivalent of flushing your stash when the cops show up. Then, when he returned home later, he simply restored his library from Time Machine -- no muss, no fuss.
Mike, we salute you and your outside-the-box approach to capacity management. Next time, though, might we suggest a portable drive?
Over at Macworld, Glenn Fleishman has an initial hands-on report about Apple's new Time Capsule combination Airport Base Station and NAS, and he's confirmed something folks were wondering about: "you can also perform Time Machine backups to drives attached to the Time Capsule via USB." This is interesting, because Apple originally said that Time Machine backups would be possible to an AirDisk (that is, an USB external drive on the regular AirPort Extreme Base Station).
Just before Leopard shipped, that feature quietly disappeared, leaving some early-adopters who had counted on that capability in the lurch. The obvious questions now are whether there's any technical reason why Time Machine to AirDisk wouldn't work on the AEBS, and whether Apple is holding the feature back just to promote the Time Capsule. In any case, it's good to know that if you get a Time Capsule you're not limited to the internal storage, perhaps making the smaller 500GB model that much more attractive.
There are two good ways to control Time Machine; you can control it through the Dock and, as of 10.5.2, via the menu bar. Now you can control Time Machine through Dashboard. Time Machine Launcher is a dashboard widget that allows you to force a Time Machine backup, or disable/enable Time Machine on the fly. More control is always good! You can download this widget for free (donations are accepted) from the developers' website.
As we've mentioned recently, one of the conditions for a successful bare-metal restore of a Time Machine backup is a Leopard install DVD; you boot from the DVD, choose your backup as source material, wait some number of hours, and then you're back in business. Wouldn't it be good, wondered a tipster at Macosxhints.com, if you could combine the need for a DVD with all that lovely free space on your Time Machine drive and somehow accelerate this process?
Enter the "you got your peanut butter in my chocolate" solution: before you set up your Time Machine backups, use Disk Copy Utility to clone your Leopard DVD onto the blank hard drive. Once Time Machine is running, it should leave the DVD clone alone and simply use the rest of the drive for data. If you ever need to recover from a catastrophic failure, you've got a bootable Time Machine restore drive that acts just like the Leopard DVD.
My idle question (and one I plan to test when I can) is if you can actually install a lean system, perhaps with some key utilities and tools, alongside your Time Machine data; boot from that when you need to, and do repairs/recovery before moving on to the restore process. It would almost certainly be safer to carve off a small boot partition (20 GB would be ample) and set up a bare-bones boot environment, but it would be fun to try it all on the same volume and see what happens. Of course, when you hear "fun" and "backups" in the same sentence, turn tail and run.
Time Machine is probably the defining feature in Mac OS X Leopard. It provides a nice, clean interface for you to backup and restore your files; but did you know you can also restore your computer from the Time Machine backup?
When you insert the Leopard install disk and boot off of it you will be presented with a semi-Mac OS X desktop. In the menu bar, select Utilities and then "Restore System from Backup..." Select your backup drive, the date you want to backup from, and then click restore.
James Duncan Davidson has a full guide on his website describing how the process went. He mentions that while it restores all the files, the caches and databases are not restored. This means when you launch programs such as Mail the application will need to recreate the database, which may take some time.
Tom Yager, one of my favorite tech writers, has posted a great overview of how Time Machine works in Leopard. Imagine my surprise to find out that Apple's backup solution doesn't involve a Flux Capacitor of any kind! It does, however, involve lots of file copying, and clever disk space saving measures. Tom answers some questions about how much work you'll lose if you need to restore from a Time Machine backup (given the nature of how Time Machine saves files that answer varies depending on how far back you need to go). He also sheds some light on what, exactly, Time Machine is doing.
Hey there, Austin Powers, are you having trouble getting your Time Machine to be-have? Two Apple tech notes spotted by Macfixit.com point up a pair of issues that may prevent your backup mojo from working.
First, if Time Machine backs up about 10 gigabytes and then stalls out, you probably need to reformat your target drive with either GUID or APM partitioning (depending on whether you're backing up an Intel or a PPC machine; no word on what to do if you plan to back up a mixed environment to the same drive). Second, if your backup files don't show up in the Space: 1999 interface, chances are you've got non-alphanumeric characters in your computer name, and you'll have to change that before TM will work properly. If you've upgraded your computer, you need to give the new machine the same name as the old one.
It's not yet clear why the machine name is crucial to proper TM functionality -- perhaps the path names need to be "UNIX legal" to work with TM's linking scheme? In any case, try these two tips if your Time Machine is trapped in feudal Japan.
One of the most visible new features in Leopard is Apple's integrated backup tool, Time Machine. Taking backups -- a chore that few people do and even fewer do correctly -- and making them one-click simple is bound to improve the lives of millions of Mac users who, despite being practically perfect in every way, sometimes delete files they don't mean to delete. (I know, painful but true.)
There is a lot of excitement about Time Machine, but also some confusion; reader Matteo wrote in from Switzerland to ask that we cover some basics for setting up Time Machine. Your wish; our command. Most of our answers are gleaned from Apple's feature page for TM, a worthwhile read.
Posted Jul 27th 2007 11:00PM by Mat Lu Filed under: Software
TimeDrawer looks like a very interesting document versioning utility that gives you a preview of Leopard's forthcoming Time Machine functionality. It installs as a system preference and "stores your files everytime you update them." It allows you to go back and visually ascertain the differences in previous versions with an Expose-like modal interface (though obviously a far cry from Time Machine's groovy out-of-this-world thing). You activate the interface with a contextual menu, so you can see changes in files on your desktop or within a given folder, etc.
There have been some previous document versioning applications like Versomatic, but TimeDrawer's interface looks very slick. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine TimeDrawer will last long once Leopard is released (except maybe for those who stick with Tiger, which it requires). On the positive side, TimeDrawer does not require an external drive like Time Machine.
TimeDrawer is now in beta and is a free download from ONERIVER software
RoughlyDrafted has posted the first pictures of posters up at WWDC 2007-- the event of course doesn't start until Monday, but Apple is already starting to plaster the Moscone Center West with tasty morsels of what we might see there next week. As you can see, it looks like Leopard is not surprisingly going to take center stage-- the long banner in the pic above specifically references Time Machine (there's even a little logo just left of the star).
Unfortunately, there's no reference to any of the "secret features"-- MacOSXHints rounded up a good poll of what we might see there. Since I wasn't around to make predictions the other day, I'll drop one right now: like Gruber, I think Leopard will be beautifully resolution independent. Yeah, I know, not too far out on the limb, but I just got here, so I'm playing it safe.
Update: Commenter iwit helpfully points out a flickr page with even more shots.
Time Machine is the one feature in Leopard that I am both most excited about, and dreading. It is a fantastic idea to have the OS take care of backups automatically, and I think it will solve many common problems folks have. However, as Anil Dash points out, Microsoft did this first. Microsoft's feature is called Shadow Copy, and it just isn't as sexy as Time Machine, though it does pretty much the same thing. Anil opines that whilst it is true that Microsoft did this first Apple will get all the credit because Time Machine is so dang cool.
Which brings me to why I am dreading Time Machine. I've said this before, but the jarring nature of Time Machine's interface concerns me. There is nothing like it on the Mac, and I am hoping that Time Machine doesn't herald the arrival of all sorts of wacky, non-standard UI treatments. Oh well, at least my files will be safe.
If you're like me, you probably spend a great deal of time using your Mac. From checking email, working with photos, surfing the web and paying bills to writing posts just like this, my Mac serves me well in so many ways. Using it every day as I do, I tend to create a massive amount of files, photos, emails and all of the other items that go along with daily Mac use.
As we 
Update 9 pm ET: Our comrade 
There are two good ways to control 
Tom Yager, one of my favorite tech writers, has posted a great overview of 
