If you are curious as to how Time Machine does its magic, you might want to take a good half hour to read the lengthy piece by Sven-S. Porst.

X.5 Time Machine (Quarter Life Crisis):

The impression I get from this – my limited experience spanning a few months and the reports I read – is the following: Time Machine is worth having because it does make an additional copy of your data and is unlikely to accidentally destroy that additional copy.
On the other hand there are still plenty of practical issues at this stage.

Overall I share his opinion that Time Machine is a good step in the right direction, meaning at least it provides some level of safety, but nothing will replace a really good backup strategy.

Myself? I have Time Machine backing up my MacBook Pro to a Time Capsule, I do daily backups of my important work directory on an external 2.5″ FireWire drive, and, every monday night, I do full incremental backup of my whole MacBook Pro using EMC Retrospect on an external 500GB FW800 hard disk, that stays at my wife’s office the rest of the week. Yeah, I know, what happens if the house burns monday night when all the backups are in my house? Worst-case scenario, I have yearly archives of all my stuff stored a couple hundred kilometers away…
And I’m actually looking for setting up a remote network backup somewhere just to be on the safe side ;-)

What about you? Paranoid or candid?

(Via daring fireball.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 00:00 CET and is filed under Apple talk, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.