Snarkface Gets Hip

When I upgraded to Leopard a while back, I also bought a big fat 500 GB hard drive for Time Machine. That’s bigger than I need to backup my MacBook, but I was thinking about that 24-inch iMac with a similar hard drive I’ll have someday.

I’ve been plugging in the external drive every once in a while and letting Time Machine do its thing. Once in a while it has to nag me: “It’s been 10 days…” etc., but I have been doing the backups. You can guess the rest of this post, I’m sure.

Yep, it happened: I discovered a page on a corporate client’s website was unaccountably mangled, probably the result of an inadvertent deletion just before saving, the last time I updated it. Not good. I didn’t have the missing text saved anywhere, nor did I have an older version of the file. Oops!

I “never” make mistakes like that. That’s why I’ve always considered Time Machine an interesting feature that wouldn’t ever make a difference for someone like me, who always keeps an updated clone. Of course, the clone had the stupid mangled version of the file, which did me no good at all. So for the first time ever, I fired up Time Machine and went looking for an older, correct version of a certain HTML document. Sure enough, I found it, and it was fun, especially for an old science-fiction movie freak like me. I had to go all the way back to late April, but there it was! The only drawback was that I found it so quickly. I wanted to keep on drilling down into the past.

But it saved my life, this thing did. SAVED MY LIFE! (Well, the Webmaster side of it.) Another cool thing was that while restoring the old file, I found I could still keep the current one, which still had some bits I needed. It only takes once, doesn’t it? But now I need no convincing.

Time Machine: thank you, Apple. What a deal.