Comment Re:This is why Time Machine is such a boon... (Score 1) 463
VSS (shadow copy / system restore) is essentially Time Machine on Windows.
No, not by a long shot. They both allow you to take snapshots of your files/drive, but that's where the similarity ends.
Time Machine's implementation, both from the technical standpoint and from the user experience one, sets it apart from VSS. A consequence of that is that Time Machine is a system that even clueless end users can (and do!) take advantage of.
For a good summary of Time Machine's implementation see the excellent Ars Technica review of OS X 10.5 Leopard by John Siracusa.
Quite frankly the only backup+versioning system that I can recall that has similar functionality to Time Machine is tym, a rather complex bash script that leverages the --link-dest option of rsync. I use it to back up other Unix-like systems, as well as data on OS X machines for which I don't have administrative access.
But quite frankly it has many technical disadvantages, and furthermore it is not something that I would expect an end user to be able to configure and use. Of course you can roll out a much simpler script like this, but then again you are losing even more functionality and still suffer from the technical drawbacks without really improving the usability for non-technical users.