[MacGeek1955]

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Why couldn't it work on one drive, can't that data just be stored somewhere in a protected folder? As I understand it, it's neither a disaster prevention nor backup solution, just a nifty revision-management tool. Apple likes to bill themselves as making elegant solutions. Time Machine in its current form is not elegant.

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Elegant or not, a hard drive crash in the best of circumstances causes much lost valuable time, a worst case scenario means lost working files including irreplacable data. I've seen people send their hard drives to companies who charge thousands of dollars to attempt to recover data from crashed drives Backing up is definitely Mac like. Hard drives are the weakest link on your Mac. Macs contain well made well designed systems but they use cheap hard drives like everyone else. The life time of today's hard drives is 1/4 or less than those of 90's SCSI drives and we bombard these drives with reckless abandon. Besides a shorter lifespan, modern, hard drives are less dependable and can die without giving ANY warning. Backing up is for me imperative.

[heisetax]

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I like the idea... for example, Time Machine needs another HD to work (not even a partition, but a whole HD), so, as it is right now, you couldn't use it with an iMac or a MB/MBP or a Mini... unless, of course, you have an external drive, but that is not maclike, it's not an out-of-the-box feature...
So they're promoting Time Machine as a big feature, but you can't use it unless you buy another hard drive (external), it's illogical!

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But Apple now has only external fax modems. This may just be to get us used to having everyone have things hanging from our Macs. When I use my PowerBook in my office I have connected: dvi for 30" display, FW800 for external storage &/or boot the system from, FW400 for additional storage like CF card readers or camera, USB wire from KVM for keyboard, trackball, flashdrive or other USB device, Ethernet to connect to network for offloading information or printing, & the power connector so I don't have to keep changing batteries. I only need to come up with a new hard drive by next summer. For me this is all that needs to be done, for others it will ruin their pristine computer environment.
There's a price for everything. But when it comes to backing up or having copies of old files, this maybe a small price to pay. With my income tax program, I try to have a daily savings under a new name during program updating time.
If the price is too high, then just skip that item.
Bill the TaxMan

[DocNo]

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There's no way in hell I'm going to lug around an external hard drive plus cables and keep it connected to my PowerBook just to use Time Machine.

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No one said it would be restricted to a hard drive. In fact, I could have sworn I saw them state it would support WebDAV, which means I can backup to any WebDAV server (like your iDisk on .Mac, or gmail with one of many free hacks).
Time Machine is another version of Continuous Data Protection (CDP). CDP is just now catching on in the Windows/Enterprise world. What is really exciting, to me, about Time Machine is the apparent API that exist for developers to integrate Time Machine into their apps.
Anyone can do file system backups. But if I have a recipe program and delete one recipe, I have to restore an old copy of my database, open it, figure out a way to extract just the one recipe and then import it into my current database.
What a pain in the butt! However if my recipe program supported Time Machine, I just click on the time machine icon, navigate back to the deleted recipe and then restore it with a click.
I think even that could pass the all important Mom Test ™! If it catches on and developers embrace it, that one feature alone would make this a mandatory OS upgrade. Apples vertical, system-wide approach is what takes this from an every-day run-of-the-mill backup application to something truly paradigm shifting!
Yes, system restore and Volume Shadow Copy exist on Windows, but system restore only covers the OS. Furthermore, its not automatic. Restore points have to be created. Volume Shadow Copy only allows for 32 snapshots at a time. Hardly continuous. They both have their pros and cons, but neither is as useful as CDP, and CDP by itself isnt nearly as useful as applications that are integrated fully with it ala Time Machine.
And just in case anyone is wondering why I am typing so much on this, I have been implementing a large server consolidation and coupled with that a re-architecture of our backup solution at an enterprise level, so I have been living, eating and breathing storage and backup/restore software for the past year or so watching the Time Machine demo was like a bolt of lightning! Seriously good stuff

[MacTel]

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As I understand it, it's neither a disaster prevention nor backup solution, just a nifty revision-management tool. Apple likes to bill themselves as making elegant solutions. Time Machine in its current form is not elegant.

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Well, for the networked home environment or business it is an elegant solution. In the keynote they stated you could back-up to another Mac (or in their words a server). Many of us have more than one Mac so this is a perfect solution.

[heisetax]

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Why couldn't it work on one drive, can't that data just be stored somewhere in a protected folder? As I understand it, it's neither a disaster prevention nor backup solution, just a nifty revision-management tool. Apple likes to bill themselves as making elegant solutions. Time Machine in its current form is not elegant.

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Elegant or not, a hard drive crash in the best of circumstances causes much lost valuable time, a worst case scenario means lost working files including irreplacable data. I've seen people send their hard drives to companies who charge thousands of dollars to attempt to recover data from crashed drives Backing up is definitely Mac like. Hard drives are the weakest link on your Mac. Macs contain well made well designed systems but they use cheap hard drives like everyone else. The life time of today's hard drives is 1/4 or less than those of 90's SCSI drives and we bombard these drives with reckless abandon. Besides a shorter lifespan, modern, hard drives are less dependable and can die without giving ANY warning. Backing up is for me imperative.

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I agree with you when it comes to backing up your hard drive. I even went so far as to shnge my hard drive yearly or sooner in my PowerBook. Partially to increase storage, but mainly to help insure that I did not have a lost main hard drive. But this goes farther than just complete backups. Find someone who is writing software for their business or to sell. They sometimes need to go backs a few days or weeks because they made some change that did things that they did not plan to happen. Sometimes its easier to go back than to correct. Many will have these copies, but not everyone. Time Machine would also help here.
The more uses for Time Machine the more value it can add to our OS.
Bill the TaxMan

[Monkeypox]

"When I get a new Microsoft product in the mail its often like that moment when youve got both feet on the brakes but you know that the car cant possibly stop in time. You dont know whats going to happen. You just hope it wont hurt too much."
Thank you Andy /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[DocNo]

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Time machine looks cool, but lets face it, it's just a pretty interface for Apple's .Mac Backup utility.

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Google "Continuous Data Protection"
Time Machine is nothing like .Mac backup!

[Moof_in_Charge]

>>>>The life time of today's hard drives is 1/4 or less than those of 90's SCSI drives and we bombard these drives with reckless abandon
Actually this is not correct at all. The MTBF of a new drive is 2-4 x of older SCSI drives. The new drives have better Error correction, fault tolerance and less prone to data loss. I am surprised to see you post that!

[DocNo]

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As I understand it, it's neither a disaster prevention nor backup solution, just a nifty revision-management tool. Apple likes to bill themselves as making elegant solutions. Time Machine in its current form is not elegant.

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Did you even watch the same demo?
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Continuous[/u]data_protection
Time Machine records every changes to files and lets you restore any file from any point in time. It more than likely uses some sort of differential compression algorithm to keep from making multiple copies of a file (lets give Apple some credit here).
As others have pointed out, keeping copes of files on the same hard drive kind of defeats the purpose of backing up in case of a total hard drive failure.
As for laptop use, I would suspect, like a few of the already shipping products on Windows, it caches changes locally and more than likely would let you restore from that local cache. This is only speculation, but it makes sense on many levels and there are shipping products for Windows that already do this. And I highly doubt a company as focused on end user experience as Apple wouldn't take into consideration that you aren't necessarily going to have an external hard drive or network drive constantly available.
However, you still want to plug into your external hard drive or get access to your network server on a regular basis so Time Machine can make a copy that isnt on your hard drive. If thats not disaster recovery, I dont know what your definition of disaster recovery is.
As for elegant, just use any of the currently shipping backup products from Retrospect or any other traditional backup product (including .Mac backup gah!) to any of the currently shipping Windows Continuous Data Protection products. They all blow. Time Machine is simple, intuitive and as I have stated, Ill bet my mom can use it without me having to spend two hours showing her how, and without me having to wait for her to take detailed notes and then still call me when she cant figure it out as happens with so many other products.
And when you factor in Apples API to allow developers native Time Machine support from within their applications well, it doesnt get any more elegant than that.
So I wouldnt be so quick to disparage the one feature that will fundamentally change the way most people do backups. Something that everyone one should do for many obvious reasons, but few of us rarely do because its such a PITA.
This is the kind of non-sexy feature that is critical for everyone to do. Most people will blow it off like you are, since its only backup. Kudos to Apple for taking something that, until Time Machine ships, is ugly, cumbersome and not well understood and making it drop-dead simple.
Makes me wonder why other vendors, many who only do backup software for a living , cant innovate like Apple is.

[leicaman]

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But Apple now has only external fax modems. This may just be to get us used to having everyone have things hanging from our Macs.

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Bill,
Who says? Just today was announced 1TB wireless storage. With Apple's no doubt moving to 802.11n, then wireless storage would really make Time Machine sing, no? Apple could come out with their own hardware that does something like allow hot swapping RAID drives (JBOD or whatever it is?) and even reminding you which volume it is you have to swap in to get the backed up item you want.
Apple should hire me. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Jason Snell]

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Time Machine records every changes to files and lets you restore any file from any point in time.

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Time Machine actually conflates days, so you don't get a minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour change track.

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It more than likely uses some sort of differential compression algorithm to keep from making multiple copies of a file (lets give Apple some credit here).

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I suspect this is not the case... if you change one byte in a 1GB file, it will take up 2GB on the drive (i.e., the file will appear twice).

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As others have pointed out, keeping copes of files on the same hard drive kind of defeats the purpose of backing up in case of a total hard drive failure.

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Yes, although it does at least give you rollback features. But you'd be dumb not to have it on a separate mechanism. Even then, if your computer bursts into flames, you'll be in bad shape -- but it will protect you against a hard drive death.

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As for laptop use, I would suspect, like a few of the already shipping products on Windows, it caches changes locally and more than likely would let you restore from that local cache.

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It doesn't seem so. But it does seem like it will queue up changes and then transfer them the next time it sees that the backup volume has been mounted.

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As for elegant, just use any of the currently shipping backup products from Retrospect or any other traditional backup product (including .Mac backup gah!) to any of the currently shipping Windows Continuous Data Protection products. They all blow.

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Couldn't have said it better myself.

[moose_n_squirrel]

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Apple should release a Personal Server to act as a central repository for all that data and more. It would clearly fit in with the way that Time Machine works too.

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THis should be easy to set up with a Mac mini, and for more whole-house backup storage you can add one or more of those huge FireWire hard drives that stacks seamlessly with the mini. It could of course be headless, taking up almost no space. I could see, from your idea, Apple coming out with a cool, simple version of OS X Server for the home. iServe?

[DocNo]

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Time Machine records every changes to files and lets you restore any file from any point in time.

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Time Machine actually conflates days, so you don't get a minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour change track.

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Hmm, that would be vastly less useful. I hope it is more granular than a day, and we just haven't been able to discern that from the available demo's.

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It more than likely uses some sort of differential compression algorithm to keep from making multiple copies of a file (lets give Apple some credit here).

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I suspect this is not the case... if you change one byte in a 1GB file, it will take up 2GB on the drive (i.e., the file will appear twice).

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That would be suicide. Differential compression is mature technology, and Mac users tend to have large, media oriented files. If Apple weren't doing some sort of differential/journaling technology, I don't see how Time Machine can be practical. On the other hand, the drive manufacturers would love Apple. I wonder if Apple has bought large blocks of stock in any HD manufacturers lately /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
And what do you mean "the file would appear twice". I doubt you are going to be able to access the time machine backup volume. Indeed, Time Machine demands exclusive access to the volume (be it a physical disk or network disk). More than likely because it is differential in nature. Snapshoting technology work like journals on database software - streams of bits with pointers to different versions. Follow the pointers backwards to reconstruct the file/items... definetly not readable in the Finder.

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As for laptop use, I would suspect, like a few of the already shipping products on Windows, it caches changes locally and more than likely would let you restore from that local cache.

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It doesn't seem so. But it does seem like it will queue up changes and then transfer them the next time it sees that the backup volume has been mounted.

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Well, it is a 1.0 product. No need to have the perfect backup app on the first release /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

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As for elegant, just use any of the currently shipping backup products from Retrospect or any other traditional backup product (including .Mac backup gah!) to any of the currently shipping Windows Continuous Data Protection products. They all blow.

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Couldn't have said it better myself.

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Hehe - I've been living in backup/storage for the last year - Time Machine is a refreshing breath of fresh air that will hopefully light a fire under the rest of the backup industry.
Anyway, time will tell /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[knighthawk]

I suspect this is not the case... if you change one byte in a 1GB file, it will take up 2GB on the drive (i.e., the file will appear twice).

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There would just be a diff comparison between the files. Some files this will not work well with because there are two many changes (such as multimedia files) but for most files this approach is ideal.