Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
And yet, I find the shine wearing off more and more, for several
reasons:
•
Time Machine's approach doesn't scale well to large amounts of
data. For one thing, backing up lots of large files takes far longer
than it should, because Time Machine always copies entire files
rather than using delta encoding as many other backup apps do.
And, even if your Time Machine drive has plenty of storage space,
by the time you have several months worth of backups, the sheer
number of files seems to bog down Time Machine and make simple
operations unreasonably sluggish.
•
Although Time Machine is supposed to be almost invisible in
ordinary use, it sometimes uses up far too many system resources.
If I notice the fan on my wife's MacBook Pro start to wail, it's
usually because Time Machine happens to be running.
•
Time Machine is pretty good at restoring individual files and folders
from a specific point in time. But it falls down in a number of
common usage scenarios. For example, suppose your hard drive
dies and you replace it with a bootable duplicate you created last
week—and now you want Time Machine to restore only the files that
changed
since last week
. There's no easy way to do that.
•
One of Time Machine's flashiest features when it was introduced
was the capability to restore individual items within apps like
iPhoto, Mail, and Contacts (previously called Address Book).
Although Apple later added Time Machine support to GarageBand,
it inexplicably
removed
support from iPhoto. Lots of other apps
could benefit from in-app restoration (I'm thinking of Calendar, in
particular, as well as numerous third-party apps), but for whatever
reason, Apple has backpedaled on that capability.
•
Time Machine works best with a directly connected hard drive,
but tends to be flakier and slower when backing up to a Time
Capsule or other network device. And, Apple still doesn't officially
support backing up to an AirPort Disk (a USB disk connected to an
AirPort base station), which should be pretty much the same as a
