Time Machine Review

With Time Machine you can navigate through time… Er, through your backups, back in time… Er, you can navigate through different versions and backups of your files!

Since 2007, every Mac comes with Time Machine, a backup software included with the operating system. It’s extremely simple to use, like almost everything with Apple (perhaps iTunes it’s the prominent exception): you plug in an external hard disk, set up Time Machine to use it as a backup disk, and that’s it. After an initial backup – which can be very long, depending on the content of your disk – Time Machine will back up your files once per hour.

It’s an incremental backup system, so it will save what it has been changed since its last backup. It will scan for changes and backup them every hour, and after the 24th time, it will keep just one backup for the day. (In theory, you should not run out of space in a couple of month, but it really depends on how much data you produce.) You can access it from a particular interface that lets you navigate through your backups’ history and choose the files you have to restore.

The only configuration you can tinker with is to exclude specific folders or files from the next backup: if you have a collection of movies and TV series, and you don’t want to take up all of your storage space, you can select them and tell Time Machine not to back them up.