Clever Time Machine

Time machine is a wonderful hands off solution making that claim of "invisible technology" a reality for many. It dutifully guards the data of many people using macs. Myself and my Dad included. Previously I was pretty good at cloning or taking a copy of "that" important file - but still not good enough. My Dad, never. No time, unsure of what to do etc.

Time machine does it all, hourly incremental safeguarding of all our precious data.

One thing that bugged me on more than one occasion was if I changed my machine Time Machine seemed to lose all sense of reason. Despite being wonderful at setting up my new machine to the exact condition of my old machine... it's the best migration path I've ever used! When I then wanted to backup my new machine, it wanted to start all over again and usually lose all my previous backups. Yes they were accessible but still it lost that element of seamlessness!

Things have improved, I understand this is a snow leopard update, in that at least it spots the old backups are relevant to the new machine can it can preserve your route back to those older files. It still decided to backup EVERYTHING on the new laptop, thus starting again (and taking hours and hours again) but still this is progress!

Yes I understand that is was all access list malarce and it was hackable to make the old backups integrate with the new backsup - but hacking about ACLs and Terminal settings etc. is pretty much an anathema to what timemachine is supposed to achieve!