I'm a bit paranoid about backups, so when Leopard came out, I started using Time Machine to backup in addition to doing my daily SuperDuper! backup. I started using it as an experiment to see how it would work. The one issue I see with Time machine is having to have a drive connected all the time (which I'm looking forward to 10.5.2 for the supposed ability to use Time Machine to an Airport Extreme connected drive). The other day I as working in Interface Builder modifying some nibs and it crashed. This wasn't surprising as Interface Builder doesn't handle issues such as trying to remove objects with existing connections, so I wasn't worried. However, when I launched Interface Builder again, I found that it corrupted my file. Worst case, I'd have to restore from my Subversion repository, but I would have lost a day's worth of work. I checked my Time Machine backup and bingo, a copy of the file was there from about 10 minutes before. I'm pleased that Time Machine saved me. It's kind of ironic that an Apple technology saved me from an Apple bug.
Comments
January 30th, 2008
Richard
Wow Scott, this is great news and like you, I use SD! daily for backups but this would be quite useful.
What kind of frequency do you need to have TimeMachine set for to safely get this kind of peace of mind? And, if you have it set to do something every 15 minutes, what kind of performance hit to you take when it’s working in the background?
Do I understand from your post that Apple is going to update Leopard so that non-TimeCapsule users can use an new airport extreme base station and a connected hard disk with TM?
January 30th, 2008
Scott Gruby
Hi Richard,
I use the default 1 hour for Time Machine and it works well. The performance hit isn’t all that bad as I don’t change huge files every hour. From my understanding (and maybe some speculation), the next OS update will allow non-Time Capsule users to use Time Machine with an Airport Extreme base station. That would be stupid for Apple not to do this. When it does happen, I’ll have to get a new base station as my old Airport Extreme saucer doesn’t support hard drives.
January 31st, 2008
Jon Hess
“Interface Builder doesn’t handle issues such as trying to remove objects with existing connections…”
The crash was unfortunate, but your assertion simply isn’t true.
January 31st, 2008
Scott Gruby
Hi Jon,
While generally Interface Builder works, I have found it to crash at least once in each of my development sessions. In this particular case, I crashed Interface Builder at least once every 5 minutes when working trying to remove the existing connections. Your mileage with Interface Builder may vary.