I write this post to you from my MacBook Pro, in its restored state as of last night when I finished writing an important university assignment. This is important because without Leopard’s Time Machine backup feature, I would have lost at least one or two full days getting my machine restored.

Presently, I am running a Developer’s release of Mac OS X Leopard (9A557 build) in a production environment. This is particularly dangerous because you don’t know if (or when) something is going to break. As I write this in Safari I remind myself to click ’save’ because I can’t write this again if Safari decides to crash. I paranoidly (is that even a word?) backup everything on my 250GB internal laptop’s drive. This is not bad at all, something which everyone should do. And we all know everyone does their backups frequently right?

All my work was backed up on my Mac Mini home server, but Time Machine saved me having to do a ton of restore work.

it would have gone something like this:
* Re-Install OS X
* Download and Install Mac OS X updates (which hurts my Internet quota)
* Reboot
* Reinstall all my Applications like:
Adobe CS3, update iTunes, Firefox, Adium, iWork, iLife, etc
* Restore iCal
* Restore Address Book
* Restore Safari/Firefox Bookmarks
* Restore Mail
* Restore Keychain
* Install Xcode and Developer tools
* Customise User account: Wallpaper, Dock, System Preferences, etc
* Restore Data from Server: iTunes Library, iPhoto Library, Downloads, etc.

This would have clearly taken me an entire day to restore or even longer. I know because I had to do it when I moved from Tiger to Leopard but would certainly never want to have to do again. While I’m sure some of you would point out to me I could save this time by using a program like Super Duper! and avoid this business of manually restoring things, I like the fact that I can pluck a single file from my server at a moment’s notice and get it back, something you can’t do with a flat-file backup method. Ideally it would be nice to have both methods implemented in parallel, but alas I do not have the space on my RAID for that.

So anyways, this is how the Time Machine restore went:
* Boot from Leopard Install DVD (20GB iPod over FireWire with Leopard image installed)
* Choose “Restore from Backup” from the Menu bar
* Choose a date to restore the system to being last night!
* Click Restore and wait.

The restore went very quickly and after 3 hours and 30 anxious minutes, I was back up and firing on all cylinders. Everything was there. Mail, iCal, My applications, Safari, even my 60GB iTunes library. All restored. Oddly enough, first thing I did was right-click on Time Machine and choose backup. It reported insufficient space on my external drive, probably because it was trying to backup everything again instead of doing an incremental backup. I guess I’ll have to wipe the Time Machine drive and backup again.

Full screen shot of Time Machine:

Apple have done an excellent job with Time Machine and I look forward to it saving me in the future. Thanks Apple for making this supreme tool available, I look forward to using the final release. Now…about those bricked iPhones…