Backups seem to be all the rage now. One of Apple's biggest new features of their new Leopard operation system for the Mac is Time Machine. An automatic and seamless (and awesome) backup program that allows you to go back in time to recover files and other stuff that may have been deleted. It even allows a full system restore if you lose your entire hard drive, and you're always lose an hour's work at most if you have to recover anything.
This evening I'll speak a little about Time Machine but look at some Linux and Windows alternatives too.
First, Time Machine. You can check this link for the whole spiel, but basically it allows you to plug in an external hard drive and use it to backup your entire system, all your photos, music, everything. Then it's a simple matter of clicking the little Time Machine program in the dock to recover files. If you know what you're missing you can even put that in as a search. Pretty cool stuff. It's amazing how easy and automatic it all is and completely seamless to the user and I feel that's really important.
OK, now I'll just briefly mention a Linux solution for this. It's called Flyback. It's a relatively new project for linux and it's inspired by Time Machine. You can find it at this link with full instruction on installation and usage.
For Windows, well. I'm not really sure of an "easy" way. Windows has built in software to do backups, but nothing with the simplicity of Time Machine or even Flyback. Vista makes it a little better, but I still don't recommend Vista to users. At least not yet. In Vista it uses Volume Shadow Copy to keep versions of your files and if you also use the Vista backup utility to an external drive then you can restore files from those also through the Windows Explorer (My Computer, etc). I'm going to need to look into some of the Windows options that might be easy for users. I personally use a piece of software called GoodSync to make a copy of important folders such as My Documents etc to an external hard drive. I also use Mozy (links on this page) to keep a backup of really important Windows files.
This evening I'll speak a little about Time Machine but look at some Linux and Windows alternatives too.
First, Time Machine. You can check this link for the whole spiel, but basically it allows you to plug in an external hard drive and use it to backup your entire system, all your photos, music, everything. Then it's a simple matter of clicking the little Time Machine program in the dock to recover files. If you know what you're missing you can even put that in as a search. Pretty cool stuff. It's amazing how easy and automatic it all is and completely seamless to the user and I feel that's really important.
OK, now I'll just briefly mention a Linux solution for this. It's called Flyback. It's a relatively new project for linux and it's inspired by Time Machine. You can find it at this link with full instruction on installation and usage.
For Windows, well. I'm not really sure of an "easy" way. Windows has built in software to do backups, but nothing with the simplicity of Time Machine or even Flyback. Vista makes it a little better, but I still don't recommend Vista to users. At least not yet. In Vista it uses Volume Shadow Copy to keep versions of your files and if you also use the Vista backup utility to an external drive then you can restore files from those also through the Windows Explorer (My Computer, etc). I'm going to need to look into some of the Windows options that might be easy for users. I personally use a piece of software called GoodSync to make a copy of important folders such as My Documents etc to an external hard drive. I also use Mozy (links on this page) to keep a backup of really important Windows files.
