“The Mac mini which lives under the TV set and acts as a souped-up media centre alerted me today to an update of eyeTV, the marvellous TV recording software. I duly updated – I update everything – and found that it refused to launch,” Ian Betteridge reports for Technovia.
“Thankfully, though, the Mac mini is backed up using Time Machine [part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard], which means that all I needed to do was step back an hour, select the old version of the eyeTV application, and all was fixed,” Betteridge reports. “So, thank you, Apple.”
The complete, but brief post is here.
MacDailyNews Take: Have you been saved by Time Machine, yet?
Yes, I was saved once by Time Machine. About a week after upgrading my Intel Macbook to Leopard, the hard disk crashed. Fortunately I had AppleCare and an external Time Machine disk. The disk replacement took one day, and the backup got me back to where I was 20 minutes before the crash. No lost emails, no lost files, and an incredible sense of relief…
If I really wanted to be saved by Time Machine I’d go back in time and find me some Jesus and be like, “Yo, Jesus! G’all man, you should hear the shizzle folk say ’bout you in the year 2K. Yo check out my iPhone by the way — pretty sweet, huh? Yeah, so salvation, man — lay it on me!”
And suddenly he’d be saying all this really heavy stuff and I’d be like “#$%! Where’s that iPhone SD? I need a universal translator app for Aramaic to English?” and then I’d be like, “How come my iPhone can’t voice record? @#$!”
Then I’d kill a butterfly and come back to this time and see if anything is different.
Time Machine is one of the best new functions of Leopard that seems unappreciated until you need it. Why doesn’t Apple do more to promote these fantastic features?
Absolutely…when I upgraded to 10.5.2, I lost iWork’08. Went back to Time Machine and restored it. Very simple. Clean. Elegant.
I altered a document and then needed to know the exact contents of the original. Went back a few days and opened it up again. It was very cool, having both versions available at once!
I had overwritten a document by accident and didn’t realize I needed it until “crunch time.” I went back to the previous week, and voila!
Time Machine rocks. So does Apple.
no…
still waiting for the day, something fails me…on my mac.
if I were to go back in Time, I’d also visit Jesus… to heal me from the junk food I’ve accumulated in my LIFE…. and start from fresh… but then again, he preached a life after death… so….
No, I haven’t been saved by Time Machine yet. However, just knowing it’s doing its magic every hour, just in case I need it, is a euphoric feeling.
Time Machine has saved me twice. Once on my PowerBook when permissions somehow were messed up to the point that I couldn’t launch certain programs or edit contacts in my address book. Stepped back to an older backup, resynced settings with .Mac, and I was bascially back where I started.
The second was on my Mac Pro after the first time I upgraded to 10.5.2. InDesign kept crashing any time the program needed to access the Finder (export, save, open, etc.). I downgraded back to the most recent 10.5.1 system then re-upgraded, and all work fine now (never figured out why it didn’t work the first time).
OK, the author’s use of mac mini to serve movies reminded me of two new issues:
1) My movies rented from iTunes don’t show up in Front Row–why the heck is that? Is anyone else finding this?
2) Since the most recent Leopard upgrade, full screen mode for iTunes movies/TV shows no longer extends the video to the entire screen!! Now, full screen mode just creates a tiny video in the center of the screen, surrounded by VERY thick black bands on all four sides!
Combining the impact of these two issues, I can no longer watch my iTunes movies or TV shows in full screen!!!
(Sorry for the unrelated post, but this is driving me bananas…)
Just to clarify, the combined impact is that I can’t watch RENTED movies full screen anymore. (I can use Front Row to watch owned videos full screen.)
Yes, twice when Boot Camp screwed up on the installation and wiped out my OSX Volume. Both times I was able to do a complete restore. Worked flawlessly in conjunction with Migration Assistant.
Yes. Twice.
1. A recent Adium update had a crashing bug when used with proxies. Just rolled back to a point prior to the upgrade (and was then able to wait ’til they fixed that rather promptly)
2. NetBeans upgrade caused various problems. Same story, just got in that ole TimeMachine and went back a day or so!
When I start a new circuit board layout I usually make a copy of one that closely matches what I’m about to do and then edit that one and save it as the new layout. A couple weeks ago I did that, but I forgot to make a copy first, and then saved it under the original’s name. Uh oh… original was gone! For about 30 seconds anyway. Time Machine got back my original.
Hey, Apple should do a commercial where someone tells their story about being saved by Time Machine, but it’s told by some two-bit entertainer like on those Geico commercials. NOT! (Don’t you just hate those commercials?)
Just to make me feel good, I sometime use time machine to go back to when Apple was $200. Man that was good times….
Not yet, but having lost a few months of my digital life one time in the past, I’m glad it’s there.
I wish there was a “daily” option though.
The new Handbrake released last week was extremely buggy running the latest leopard on a black 2GHz core duo MacBook. I immediately switched back to the previous version of Handbrake since it has been working flawlessly. I did use Time Machine, although downloading and reinstalling an older version of a program is not exactly a nightmare. Anyways, I am certainly glad to have backups automated instead of struggling with poorly designed backup programs of past.
Time machine will be forever under appreciated because Macs tend to work. Sorry windows guys. Best of luck out there in the wild.
Using Leopard but not Time Machine and have couple questions:
How large a drive would I need to back up my two 500GB drives?
Can the back up drive be used for other storage?
> I wish there was a “daily” option though.
Just turn Time Machine off but check the box to put the status in the menu bar. Once a day, pull down the icon from the menu bar to Back Up Now.
I spent the weekend taking photographs of all my old snapshots from pre-digital camera days. In my eagerness to see them, I started cropping them and then realized that I should have kept a copy of the originals on a spare drive before cropping. Since I had backed up when I finished uploading all the pictures, I could just go back with Time Machine to date backup and copy all the originals to the spare drive.
TimeMachine saved me twice. Once my fault.. once Apple’s!
First time, I allowed System Update to install a new version of Quicktime, which disabled my prior QuickTime Pro license. When I discovered this two days later, I had a mini panic attack until I realized I could restore. Reboot from DVD, select Time Machine from Utility menu, select image prior to “upgrade”, clicked “restore” then crossed my fingers. 1 hr later, system rebooted and all was well.
Second time was Apple’s fault. I enabled Parental Controls then used fast-user-switching to pop over to my account and check my email. This activated a well-known (except to me) bug that disables all the desktop widgets for all accounts. I tried everything I could think of to restore the widgets without success, so I used Time Machine to back up to an image from earlier in the day.
(Incidentally, the “widgets”bug was fixed by system 10.5.2 Update.)
Time Machine definitely works. Best user ever for a Firewire 800 external HDD.
Yep, been saved by Time Machine. Was working on a program, made a series of what turned out to be disasterous changes. Stepped back one hour, and all was well. MUCH better than having to start over.
If you use Time Machine to bring back a previous snapshot, do you lose recent work? In other words, does restore add or replace?
I trash random shit on purpose just so I can use Time Machine.
I was cleaning up my hard drive one day and deleting files left and right. A week later when I went to open my script I have been working on upwards of a year…. nothing. Went back a week in Time Machine and BOOYAH! File restored. THANK JOBS FOR TIME MACHINE!