It’s not exactly the Delorean, but Apple’s new operating system has a time machine of its own.

Mac OS X 10.5, dubbed “Leopard” by the marketing team, features, amongst other things, a backup program called Time Machine.

Time Machine works like this: you install a second hard drive and (or another Leopard Mac on the network) and then Leopard asks if you want to install Time Machine. Then you click it. And then it’s done.

Time Machine will then update an exact replica of your primary hard drive every hour or whenever you ask it to. At the end of the day, Time Machine replaces those hourly backups with a single daily backup. And at the end of the month, it replaces those weekly updates with a monthly backup.

But what happens when you need to use it? Apple brings out all kinds of bells and whistles with this one. As if traveling through space, clicking on Time Machine throws your current desktop into the ether and sends you through a starfield, like you just hit the warp drive on the Millenium Falcon. Windows will then appear where you can go back through a cascade of Finder screens to rediscover that moment when everything was right and recover your lost files.

After that, you click restore and presto: your files are back and tragedy is averted.

All of the stars and effects may seem goofy, but the idea is to get you to use the backup program. How many of us actually go ahead and back things up? Many of us wish we had, and perhaps Time Machine’s attractiveness will drive us to use it.

There’s plenty of other good clean fun on Leopard, but Time Machine is the one thing Apple’s been pushing the hardest on the new OS, and it’s obvious why. This looks like the most sophisticated and user-friendly backup program out there, hands down.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 6:37 pmand is filed under Business, Technology. 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.