Time Machine First Experience

I had my first experience using the new back-up utility included in OSX Time Machine the other day and thought it would be worth posting my impressions here. For some reason my iTunes library was corrupted in the last couple of days so I got the first opportunity to put Time Machine through its paces. In terms of usage once you launch Time Machine you get a glossy interface that offers you a view of your Finder in the middle of the screen and a time scale running off into space on the right side of the screen. Use of the application is very clean and seamless simply scroll back through different dates on the right hand scale till you find the appropriate date and you'll see the files updating dynamically as you scroll. Once you've found the file you want simply select it and click on the restore button which will restore the file to your desktop or specified file folder. 

My take is that Time Machine hits the target in terms of its stated purpose in providing OSX users with a great tool for easily and simply backing up their files to an external drive. What Time Machine isn't is a full back-up tool that would displace SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner in terms of making a bootable back-up of your entire hard drive.

While it's hard to get excited about a file back-up utility - Time Machine is likely one of the more subtle improvements in this release of the operating system. Since the majority of users never bother to back-up I think that the ability to turn Time Machine on, select your preferences (e.g., which folders to back-up) and simply let the program run. I will say that Time Machine is disk hungry and I'd recommend picking up a large hard drive (best to get a minimum 2x larger drive than the one that is internal to your Mac).