Before I get into my little story from the last 24 hours, let me first say this: I don’t do backups. Well, I should say I didn’t do backups. Leopard’s Time Machine has changed that, and this is why….

Yesterday I decided it would be a good idea to update OS X to 10.5.3. I’ve not been experiencing any problems, but I’m one of those people that doesn’t feel complete unless they’re running all the latest versions of their software. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve taken something that works absolutely fine and made it into a steaming pile of chaos. Do I learn? No, no I don’t !

At around 10pm last night, I hit the update button and off it went. After downloading a few hundred MB of data the machine rebooted. I did my usual holding of breath while I waited for the Apple screen to appear. Sure enough it appeared, shortly followed by my desktop. It’s alive ! Well, sort of. I fired up skitch to take a screen grab of my newly updated baby and boom! Skitch disappeared. I tried again, Skitch disappeared again. Fine, not a problem, just a hiccup I thought. Wrong again. Numbers wouldn’t load, VMWare wouldn’t work, it was basically broken. Now back in my Windows days this would have been a disaster of biblical proportions. That was the reason I had all my apps, games and data on various partitions draped across two physical drives. Windows fell over and I just vaped the operating system’s partition and started again. None of this messing with OS X !

Fast forward to tonight. After a hard day’s work (well, I’d been at work at least!) I sat down to sort out the mess my meddling had created.

In goes the Leopard DVD, the whole of my 500GB Western Digital Caviar goes bye-byes and we start again. A couple of cups of coffee later and I’m staring at a screen asking if I want to pull all my applications, data and preferences from a Time Machine backup. YES I DO ! Not too long after that I’m sat here typing away in Maresedit. I’ve not had to install a thing, it’s all as it was before I broke it. Yay for Time Machine !

So that’s basically why I love Time Machine. I don’t do backups, but thankfully a clever man at Apple made it so I don’t have to. Then when it all goes belly up it’s not the end of the world. Well done that man!

Has time machine saved your bacon? Do you even use it? Let us know below!