Leopard Update/Time Machine
After reading zillions of online articles, and finally installing Leopard (OS X 10.5) on two of our household’s computers, I’m satisfied that there are no major glitches to watch out for, as long as you install it properly.
Go for it! The new Time Machine automatic back and simplified restore alone makes Leopard worth the money, and Apple surely knows that, because their packaging and background imagery make it plain that Time Machine is Leopard’s biggest selling point.
Downsides? Some of my older programs (such as Thoth, which nobody uses except for me) tend to get overwhelmed by the new Spaces feature, and the newfangled Finder windows keep making me think that I’m looking at iTunes windows. I’m having to do a lot of re-learning my most common Finder keystrokes, because things have been moved around a lot.The changes have all been made in the name of making life simpler, so I’m not complaining. I’m adapting!
The hidden cost of upgrading to leopard is that you MUST BUY AN EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE! This is not optional. Why? Because the process of backing up and restoring has finally, finally been reduced to the simplest, most elegant steps imaginable, and external hard drives are cheap-cheap-cheap. Choose the biggest one that you can afford, and make sure that it has Firewire if you aren’t sure whether your Mac has the newer, faster USB ports.
I’ve pulled out a lot of my hair trying to help folks do data backups, because of the disastrous alternative. In fact, as I’m writing this, there is an iMac G5 on the floor next to my feet waiting forlornly for its owner to pick it up. He lost EVERYTHING when the hard drive failed. He had no backup whatsoever. He was begging me to help him recover his tens of thousands of crucial e-mail messages, and after three days of trying, I had to give up.
Now, with Time Machine, there are two steps involved in order to achieve perfect backups :
1. Connect the hard drive to the Mac and turn it on.
2. When Leopard asks you if you want to use the hard drive for backups, you say yes. That’s it.
Everything else is completely automatic. No programming, no annoying glitches, nada.
I just got back from a week of classes at the Apple Mothership in Silicon Valley, and we learned an immense amount of stuff that was super-secret hush hush. Now that Leopard is finally shipping, I can reveal the most important detail:
Time Machine is not just some extra program that got thrown together. It’s built into the deepest parts of the operating system. It works so perfectly because everything else has been built around it. Microsoft has had something sorta similar in concept for years, but it’s an add-on program, it’s hard to use, and it backs up onto the same drive as your data! The new backup option in Microsoft’s Vista operating system isn’t any simpler or friendlier.
Leopard is going to add an enormous amount of peace and tranquility to the world’s balance of mental anguish, due to the ease and value of Time Machine.
