Easy Backup For The Masses: Time Machine Comes Close

Well, it's been years since my whole family switched from Windows to Macintosh, giving up free tech support from yours truly as I insisted that "I don't no nothin' about birthin' no Macs" when they called. When the time to buy a new laptop came, I bought a MacBook Pro and immediately set up Boot Camp and VMware Fusion so I could still run my Windows apps.

With OS X Leopard, Apple's gotten much of the user backup problem right. Plug a USB or Firewire hard drive into your Mac and, with just a few minutes of setup, Time Machine will start making hourly backups to the external drive, storing a daily backup until the disk is full and then killing off the oldest backups as it needs space.While anyone reading this blog could figure out how to backup their system to an external hard drive, Apple deserves big brownie points for making it transparent and providing a great restore user interface that will let even a typical Mac user find the version of his résumé from last month by clicking through folders that represent each set of backups.

At Macworld this week, Apple announced the $299 Time Capsule, an 802.11n router and 500-Gbyte hard drive that Time Machine can use as a backup target.

Capsule shampsule! Time Machine should support backup to a network share. Every geek I know has a home NAS server and, unlike Time Capsule, they have mirrored drives and media servers so we can play those MP3s on the stereo.

Now if Apple can automate a second stage backup from Time Capsule to .MAC, that would be something.