Time Machine is Industrial Strength

I’ve always been pretty skeptical about consumer-focused backup solutions. Apple’s first entry into this product space, Backup.app, was a crapshoot; it failed for me in the worst possible way — it’d indicate that backups were successful and then lock up on restore.

For a couple of years after that I primarily used rsync. No muss, no fuss, but restoring a work machine to operation was pretty laborious, since the only part of the box that I could trust to rsync’s BSD underpinnings was my home directory. This worked pretty well in general, but I would still have to go through an OS install or two, install developer tools, set up LaunchDaemons or StartupItems, and so forth. In short: lots of geek fiddling, which I didn’t mind since I figured I was getting the most reliable solution around for the kind of systems I use.

I am very impressed with Time Machine. I used Time Machine to restore a backup from my work laptop (a 32-bit MBP) to its replacement (a faster, spiffier, brand new 64-bit Core2 MBP), and not only was all the usual stuff in my home directory safe, the new machine is now an exact copy of the original. I mean, down to the last bit — after booting the Leopard install DVD and restoring from the external FireWire drive, the machine — which runs a local copy of slide’s website, with a custom Apache, mod_python, MySQL installation, and a host of other custom software — came up with 100% of the software working. Even preferences, Mail.app accounts, and my .Mac sync services settings work.

I’ve never seen a consumer-grade backup solution work this well in practice. As a final touch, when the machine came up after the restore, it rescheduled another backup run for a few minutes in the future. Nice.