Time Machine ...yawn

R

rootMe

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Getting back into Mac now i see so many people raving about Time Machine.
Whats the big deal ? rsync has been around and doing the same thing for many years....

Give me a few reasons why Time Machine (apart) from the gui is better the UNIX we all know and love ?
 
Time machine is nice, simple, and involves little user interaction - most noobs (such as myself) dont want to be bothered with the terminal. :)

I really dont know much about rsync - how deep do the recursive backups go?
 
rootMe said:
Whats the big deal ? rsync has been around and doing the same thing for many years....
Click to expand...

Uhm, they don't do the same thing. rsync syncs everything. If you rsync say, your whole hard disc, you'll always have one backup that's completely up to date.

Time machine gives you multiple copies - every time something changes, it backs up the new version and keep all the older versions. So you delete your essay, say, and you tell it what you're looking for. It come back saying, OK, I've got one from yesterday, one from the day before, one from last week, etc.
 
You can do the same with rsync, you simply have to specify what you dont want to backup ie; desktop or files on size etc..., write a script and cron it to run every 10 minutes etc... You can append the backup, or make it backup under a different date and time setting effectivly creating a "Time machine History" - Can even let it run to backup remote files and machines including windows over smb.... perhaps a better solution for Servers when it comes to time machine... What you think ? rsync can perform intelligent incremental backups as well, very powerfull and very flexible.
 
one thing that really grates me about time machine is the inability to specify the intervals at which the backup should occur.. who needs hourly backups? ...and lets not even get started on Time Capsule...
 
VertigoZA said:
one thing that really grates me about time machine is the inability to specify the intervals at which the backup should occur.. who needs hourly backups? ...and lets not even get started on Time Capsule...
Click to expand...

I can see the T-Shirt now...

got scripting skills ?
 
I've just used Time Machine for the 1st time to restore stuff, just played around before.

Did a clean install of Leopard yesterday, used TM to restore around 10 apps, and it really is for noobs, easy and works perfectly (and pretty).

Hourly backups are handy if u work with stuff like spreadsheets (or essays) a lot. Or if u move your files around a lot and can't remember what u did to them.
 
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