Time Machine

24/06/08 23:52 Filed in: Tech | Mac
When Mac OS X Leopard was released a few months ago, one of the major features being promoted was Time Machine. This was Apple’s revolutionary approach to backing up, which creates incremental versions of files and documents that can be accessed by going “back in time.” So if you create a file on a Monday and amend it on Wednesday, and then on Thursday decide you actually wanted Monday’s version to work on, you can restore your current version of the file to the state it was in on Monday. When I upgraded, I set Time Machine up to back up to an external hard drive, even though I was already using SuperDuper! as a backup solution (and Mozy too. And Flickr for my photos. As you can see, I’m paranoid about data loss.)

time machine

I never had occasion to actually restore anything from any of my back-up sets till last week. I was writing a piece on this site about the death of Esbjörn Svensson, and was trying to embed an MP3 of one of his tunes into the post. Whatever happened, the page file got corrupted and threw up an error message when I tried to publish. I deleted the post, rewrote it without the MP3 and tried again. Same story. It was late and I was heading for France the following day, so I decided to leave it till I came back to sort out.

The whole site is contained as a single Rapidweaver file (called a sandwich), which is stored on the hard drive of my iMac, and backed up to my three back-up systems daily. So by the time I came back home, the corrupt file was now the backed up one. Normally, this would cause a problem, but because I have Time Machine, I was able to fix it quite easily. I just went back through Time Machine to the day before I started writing the post that caused all the problems, and brought that copy forward to the present, replacing the corrupt one. I then rewrote the post and voilà, it worked.