The latest version of Mac OS X — Leopard — went on sale today. Steve Job’s snarky comment in this post’s title was in that there’s one version and one price ($110) unlike some other operating system which has five different versions. The one with all of the features costs $330.
David Pogue, as is his custom, has his thorough review plus another column listing many additional obscure goodies. For instance, Spotlight, the ever-present search utility, now does math, is a dictionary, and launches any program in less than a second: Just press Command-Spacebar, type the first few letters of the program’s name, and then press Enter.
Probably the best addition is the “eat your vegetables” feature: “Time Machine.” It’s an idiot-proof backup system that is completely integrated into the operating system. An exact duplicate of your hard is quietly maintain on an attached hard drive. Pogue writes:
Time Machine updates its mirror of your main drive every hour, although you can also trigger updates on demand. At day’s end, Time Machine replaces those hourly backups with a single daily backup; at the end of the month, those are replaced by a single month-end backup. (Apple assumes that it won’t take you a whole month to notice that your hard drive crashed.)
If disaster strikes — sunspots, clueless spouse, overtired self — you enter Time Machine’s recovery mode. The sleek, modern-looking Leopard desktop falls away like a curtain, revealing — startlingly — a deep-space starfield. The window that once contained your files remains floating before you, with dozens of iterations of itself, like file cards, receding into the background.
You can now scroll backward through time until the window looks as it did before the unfortunate event. (You can also use the Search box to find missing files.) When you find the files you want and click Restore, the regular desktop slides back up into view. The recovered icons are back in their original window.
Given that all hard drives fail — it’s a matter of “when” not if — easy built-in backup has been criminally overdue.
While online backup services are getting better all the time, hard disk resurrection is always faster when you are pulling your files from a connected hard drive instead of sucking down Gigabytes through your Internet connection. While the backup utility SuperDuper has a number of advantages, as Andy Ihnatko argues, people are much more likely to use something that is just there on every Mac. There’s no additional software to install.
If you own a Mac that’s less than five years old, Time Machine is reason enought to upgrade. Your hard disk’s contents — your photo library in particular — are worth more than $110, right?
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