Apple's Time Machine: Forward into the past?

Computerworld - One of the most talked about features in Apple Computer Inc.'s upcoming operating system, Mac OS X 10.5, also known as Leopard, is the built-in backup tool called Time Machine. For Mac users, Time Machine is big news: It marks the first time Apple has bundled any sort of backup solution with its operating system. (While it's true that Apple's .Mac service includes a basic consumer backup tool, the service is available only to subscribers of .Mac -- at a cost of $99 per year.)

Being a Mac OS X backup tool isn't the main reason Time Machine is important. There have been any number of free, shareware and commercial backup tools for quite some time. But Time Machine is a step ahead of competitors because it's designed by Apple as a backup tool for the average computer user, meaning that it is very simple to use, with virtually no management or oversight needed.

Unique interface

Anyone who's seen Apple's demos or screenshots of Time Machine can tell that this is not a typical backup application. When you need to access a backup of any file, folder or item tucked away inside a Time-Machine-aware application, you simply select the appropriate window (such as a Finder window of the folder containing the items you need to recover) and then click the Time Machine icon in the dock.

The window you initially selected remains on display but with two arrows (backward and forward) next to it and with translucent images of the window disappearing into the background of the screen. Each translucent window indicates a previous-generation backup of the selected folder. Using the arrow keys, you can move back or forth through each backup. As the interface implies, you move backward or forward through the files on your computer based on time.

This approach is not only visually amazing -- it does look like something out of a science fiction movie -- but it is also incredibly intuitive and easy to navigate. With most backup applications, you need to locate the appropriate backup set, load its catalog file and then search for either the name of the file or browse through the backup generations based on date. This typically involves looking through file path representations to locate the correct backup set and navigate through it. Even the best backup solutions rely on an interface that is separate from the operating system.

By incorporating Time Machine into Leopard, which is due out by next spring, Apple retains the same basic interface, be it in the Finder or a Time-Machine-aware application. This means the user doesn't have to navigate through an alien file structure. To reiterate the genius of Time Machine: Select a file, click an icon in the dock and you're soon looking through past incarnations of the original item you were already viewing. There's no extra navigation except backward and forward.