Actually, I have many Time Machines. Time Machine is a feature of Mac OS X starting with Leopard (10.5). For those not familiar with versioning for MacOS, OS X (or 10) is the current OS. The current “dot” release is 6, also called Snow Leopard (10.6.)
That’s the boring part. The great part is how absolutely mind saving Time Machine is. Today, I noticed one of my email inboxes in Apple Mail was empty. All the mail was gone. I don’t know what happened. I don’t believe I deleted anything. Luckily, email back to June 23 was sitting in the “Trash” folder. I just dragged that back into my inbox. BUT, I had lots of other email in that inbox. Not to cry, I have Time Machine.
Once or twice per week, I merely plug a 1TB Western Digital drive into a USB slot in my Macbook Pro. That’s it. It performs an incremental backup of my machine. All files, except the operating system, are backed up. If I have any problems, from an accidental data loss to a crash, I can recover to exactly that last backup.
So, I brought up Apple Mail, then brought up Time Machine. It then showed me a view of Mail from today backwards. I went back to Tuesday the 20th (today is the 22nd), when the mail was there, and when I backed-up last, and clicked on “recover” for just that folder in that account. That was it. Time Machine placed all that email in a recovered folder on my Apple Mail folder list. I dragged those emails over to their inbox. DONE. Windows 7 is OK. But, it just can’t compete with OS X.
