Mac Time Machine: backup for the rest of us?

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I despise uneeded UIs

There is no reason for a backup/restore utility to have a separate UI. Microsoft got this just right by making restore as simple as:
1. Right Click and choose "Restore previous versions" on whatever you want to restore.
2. Double click on the date of the version you are interested in. Newer versions will be local, older versions will have been backed up to a network drive. You don't really need to know this information so having it all show up in one list, sorted by date, location independent is perfect and far better than the fragmented support that Apple offers where you need to know where you backed up before you can figure out how to restore.
3. Browse that version using the built in Windows Explorer, the exact same UI you use to navigate the file system normally. Copy old versions to new locations using the same copy/paste or drag-and-drop that you would to copy any file from one location to another. There literally is nothing new to learn. If you can use Windows Explorer, you can use "Restore previous versions". With Time Machine, you have to learn a whole new UI.

Take your laptop on the road? You will hate Time Machine because it simply stops the incremental backups until you reconnect to your external drive. Take a Vista machine on the road for a week and a Leopard machine on the road for a week. 2 days into the trip, you realize that you need to go back to yesterday's version. With Vista, it's there. With Leopard, it isn't. With Leopard, you need to plug in your external drive (which won't, btw, fit in your manilla envelope ) and then your only option will be to roll back to the version you had before you left for you trip. You've lost the version that you created on your first day away. Not so with Vista.

For the exact same reason I like TortoiseSVN as a front end to Subversion (no extra client, source control UI is added right into Windows Explorer), I really like Vista backup/restore. It absolutely blows Time Machine away in every possible metric other than perhaps the background to the UI (ooooo, space theme, oooooo!!) and a catchy name that makes the marketers happy.

Posted by: NonZealot   Posted on: 06/02/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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