Apple's "Time Machine" Now For Linux... Sort Of 425
deander2 writes "Apple's 'Time Machine' is cool, but I use Linux, not MacOSX. So here is a Linux implementation (built off of rsync, of course). No fancy OpenGL, but quite functional none-the-less."
Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't RTFA, so I don't know if this "Time Machine for Linux" implementation is as easy to use or not, but the real thing that makes Time Machine cool is that even my mother can use it.
The Ars Technica article about Leopard has lots of very cool details about Time Machine in it, including how it works. (It uses hard-links, including hard-links to directories, so in each and every time-stamped folder on the backup drive, you have a *FULL* copy of your HDD at that time (minus anything you excluded from the backups). Read that portion of the Ars Technica article if you want answers to questions about it.
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the difference? The interface is how you use software. If it's easy to use, it has a good interface.
Re:Not the interface (Score:4, Informative)
One can set it up once with the goofy 3d zooming thingy and then it'll happen automatically in the background. Need a file that you know was good a week ago? In term, type "cp
Most backup solutions require you use their software to restore from backup. If I interpreted the parent right, Leopard doesn't.
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the interface (Score:4, Funny)
It's a UNIX system! I know this!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it amusing that sucn an insignificant thorn to MS rates a comparative mention... "We've totally outsold that dinky 5%-of-the-market guy." Why even bring them up or mention them if they're such an insignificant portion of the market?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Something is fishy about all those numbers of market share and units sold. Lets see;
I know more people with iPhones (4) than use Vista (3) and they only sold 1.2 million iPhones in the U.S so far. 100 million copies of Vista? Maybe, but Idunno. Can't see them anywhere. Of the three people I know with Vista, two hate it and are ready to buy Macs. I know many many more people who used to own PCs who now own Macs (about 30 over two years). Seeing as one in every six laptops sold in the U.S. is a Mac [computerworld.com], that mar
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Informative)
Think of it as CVS. It tages backup times but actually only copies new data as it's checked in.
Also, TM is not confined to the Finder per say. if you're in Address Book and lost a contact, type in the filter string to locate it. Still can't find it? Right there from Address Book, hit Time Machine and Address Book will be served with backed-up address book data, filtering on the fly, as you go back in time until you find what you've been looking for.
Same thing for anything spotlight-able.
So, yeah, it's got a pretty interface, but TM goes way beyon just file/backup management.
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that supposed to be "seing"?
[duck/run]
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Funny)
And when I use incorrect French on a French website, you're welcome to correct me. I'd rather write correctly, thanks.
Re:Eh... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've seen clumsy interfaces that let you grab a backed up file from within a backup before, but never one that lets you preview - let alone do all this from within other applications.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The interface has always been horrible though, which kind of reinforces the original posters claim that the new (or at least less common) stuff is in the interface.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Eh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why on earth did MS's marketing not run with this feature and rename it 'super duper time traveler'...
Re:Eh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If Vista's actually does work that well, then you've asked a very interesting question.
Somehow, though, I don't think Microsoft suddenly woke up and figured out how to actually be fanatic about making minor hassles vanish. I'm betting Vista's feature works that well *after* you mutter the right keyboard and mouse incantation, with a lot of "well, of course"ing from people who just overwhelm them (the hassles) with competence, from the user side of the equation, and simply cannot comprehend the notion of d
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
Time Machine's ability to simply browse backwards through time in the folder, whilst still having the folder functionality usable is far beyond BackupPC. Indeed I bet there are many times that you just want to do this, you don't want to restore the file or the folder as it was then, you just want to quickly glance inside the file as it was.
There's nothing amazingly clever about Time Machine, but it is Apple "Getting It Right(tm)" interface-wise (excluding silly starfield, etc) and functionality-wise.
Re:Not the interface (Score:4, Informative)
I agree it is not just Backup software.
However, this is ALSO why 'previous versions' in Vista is more than a snapshot/backup interface as well. In Vista you can view folders as they exist at any previous time and even drag and drop the folder or files you want from the folder at a specific time in history.
Time Machine = 3D Interface of Files/Folders
Vista = Timeline List of Files/Folders
Time Machine = Uncompressed Backups to External Drive
Vista = Compressed Backups ANYWHERE + File Version Snapshots on main Hard Drive + Works on Servers and across networks (ie Can use Previous Versions on Folders/Files you have access to on Servers or other computers, and it displays that folder's snapshots and backups.)
Time Machine = Great Marketing
Vista = MS's Sucky Marketing
So Time Machine gets the cool buzz, when Vista is the cooler of the two technologies...
Re:Not the interface (Score:4, Insightful)
So it is the interface, then?
I realize the interface doesn't do the heavy lifting in an application, but I wish the FLOSS crowd would finally clue in to the fact that ease-of-use matters. For example, GnuPG is a way to protect your privacy through encryption, but it only has a CLI. GUIs exist for GnuPG, but their installation is complex. Why do people work on GnuPG? Because privacy is important! But who gives a fuck when only 1% of the population can use it? Thanks for nothing, GnuPG!
I have no particular bee in my bonnet about GnuPG, it was just the latest FLOSS effort to piss me off. Open-Source software and "Free as in Freedom" are ideas too important to be relegated to the technical elite, but the technical elite's refusal to make their tools easy enough for the rest of us cuts out most of society. You have the cure for cancer but refuse to give it to us because we don't have the time or desire to learn Perl.
This Linux "Time Machine" sounds cool. Too bad I'll never be able to use it. Bah!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, the companies are usually trying to sell service contracts to IT departments, so grandma is not in the game plan. Linspire pops to mind as a notable exception. Another is Limewire. Both of those companies arguably sell a pretty usable product for the non-IT person.
The other group is geeks. Some high percentage of the time, an open source project exists because some dud
Re:Not the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Many geeks working on FOSS are much more interested in how well something works than how easy it is to get started with. This is why, for quite a long time, Linux was hard to install, but ran well while it was up.
This goes for UIs also. As a user, I'm much more interested in how well something works once I know how to use it than how steep the learning curve is. To a point, of course -- I still haven't learned TeX.
So, as
FLOSS' failure pathos (Score:3, Interesting)
* They are coding to impress/please either A) themselves or B) their coder and sysadmin peers
* They rarely establish who their audience is (not consciously).
* The above determines what interface (in the broad sense) types will be honored. In the case of GNU system hackers, the interfaces are CLI and libwhatever APIs. ABIs are shunned p
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
if you use rsync for hourly snapshots to keep everything for the past 24 hours, you would probably do that by creating 24 separate target repositories (i.e. 24 full backups); OR, you allow rsync to create backups for your files - at most 24, but you purge any file older than a day (i.e. if there are only 2 versions for a day, the 3rd version older than 1 day gets deleted).
Now you want to extend this to keep ONE daily snapshot. Either again, create full repositories; OR yo
Re:Time Machine has been around for a while... (Score:5, Informative)
You can set up rsync to do hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backups, all taking up minimal (and I mean minimal) disk space, using hard links.
All you have to do is rm -rf your oldest directory of each kind (hourly daily, weekly, monthly) every time you run.
Heck, I'll even give you the BASH script I use to do this. Call it via cron: e.g. snapshot daily
#!/bin/bash
# This script makes a snapshot of several directories using rsync.
# Version 0.5, Rob Bos, September 8, 2002
# Modified by Pausanias August 2004
# This script is released under the terms of the
# GNU General Public License, version 2.0.
# run "hourly" from a crontab; run daily, weekly, and monthly from
[ -z "$1" ] && echo syntax: $0 snapshottype baselinesnapshottype && exit 1
type=$1 # hourly, daily, monthly snapshot?
logfile=/var/log/snapshot.log
backuproot=/Volumes/Sutton/ibackup
backup=`cat
excludefile=/etc/snapshot/exclude.txt
echo `date` >> $logfile
[ ! -e "$backuproot" ] && echo "$backuproot not mounted." >> $logfile && exit 1
# Assume that the baseline snapshot type is daily unless otherwise
# specified.
if [ "f$2" == "f" ]; then
basetype="daily"
else
basetype="$2"
fi
# if you run every two hours, make it 12, every hour, 24, etc. try to span the entire day.
# The below setting runs 8 times a day (every three hours), keeps 7 days, 4 weeks, and 12 months
# of backup.
hourlymax=8
dailymax=10
weeklymax=5
monthlymax=8
# This simplifies things down below so I can use $max to delete
# the overrotated snapshot, as well as $hourlymax/$dailymax to do
# rotation checks.
[ $type == "hourly" ] && max=hourlymax
[ $type == "daily" ] && max=dailymax
[ $type == "weekly" ] && max=weeklymax
[ $type == "monthly" ] && max=monthlymax
# Rotate the current list of backups, if we can.
if [ -d $backuproot/$type.1 ]; then
oldest=`ls -dt $backuproot/$type.* | tail -n 1 | sed 's/^.*\.//'`
echo Oldest is $type.$oldest >> $logfile 2>&1
for i in `/usr/local/bin/seq $oldest 1 -1`; do
mv $backuproot/$type.$i $backuproot/$type.$(( i + 1 ))
done
linkopt="--link-dest=$backuproot/$type.2"
else
linkopt=""
fi
if [ "$type" == "$basetype" ]; then
rsync -xva $linkopt --safe-links --delete --delete-excluded --exclude-from=$excludefile $backup $backuproot/$type.1/ >> $logfile 2>&1
elif [ "$type" == "daily" ]; then
[ -d $backuproot/hourly.$hourlymax ] && mv $backuproot/hourly.$hourlymax $backuproot/daily.1
elif [ "$type" == "weekly" ]; then
[ -d $backuproot/daily.$dailymax ] && mv $backuproot/daily.$dailymax $backuproot/weekly.1
elif [ "$type" == "monthly" ]; then
[ -d $backuproot/weekly.$weeklymax ] && mv $backuproot/weekly.$weeklymax $backuproot/monthly.1
fi
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion, without such a method for watching FS changes as they occur (or later, from a log), any hackish solution will fall far short of Time Machine's performance.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
And before that, now obsolete...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnotify [wikipedia.org]
-Brandon
Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I have mixed feelings about having a daemon following inotify (fsevents equivalent for linux) in order to backup. My setup uses backuppc [sourceforge.net], which daily rsyncs my disk and backs it up using much the same archival solution that Time Machine uses. The rsync is non-noticeable (and, in my case occurs during working hours). An inotify daemon, on the other hand, could be responding to lots of small requests that produce null results (temp files, disk writes over the same sectors, etc).
Fine-grained backups may be interesting, but I wouldn't be interested in any kind of performance drag because of it. Daily backups have served me just fine, thanks.
FS with snapshotting (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:FS with snapshotting (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
Recovery tool is better than a backup tool (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know whether this Linux implementation does something like it, but what I like most about Time Machine isn't the interface. It's the fact that the backup utility takes care of disk management automatically.
My current backup strategy works something like this:
If I were smart and vigilant, I would catch when the archive reaches about 30 GB, and create a new one then, so that managing older archives could be done in more tractable chunks. If I were rich, I would just buy a number of external drives that I would rotate as they filled up. But I am apparently neither, so I just get stuck in this cycle in which I only have a current backup 1/3 of the time, and older archives are randomly discarded or distributed wherever I can find the space.
The great thing about Time Machine is that it consistently fills up my disk with the most relevant backup data: current backups at a high frequency, and months-old backups at a low frequency. When space runs out, the oldest data gets thrown away, but the quantum chunk is a diff between backups, not an entire 80 GB archive.
faubackup/dirvish do this (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I think you're right: the value of time machine lies in its GUI. Much more than in its underlying file copy techniques. Like in any serious backup tool, the interface is _the_ key element. Obviously, data needs to be saved reliably somewhere, but that's something we can do in various ways for a long time.
An efficient backup/restore GUI is hard to do. This is what Apple has done beautifuly here, and this is
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
What if you deleted that email you really wanted, or made a bad edit to a contact in your address book, or a photo in iPhoto/Picasa? These apps store lots of data in some kind of database. As a geek, you know that you need to find this database, move the current one aside, restore the old one, export the content you want from the app, move the current database back into place, and import the content you just extracted from the old database.
With TM, Your Mom opens Mail, and presses the TM button. She gets the same 'windows through time' view, listing her mailbox at each checkpoint. She selects the message(s), and hits the restore button, and it gets brought into the current database. She doesn't care how it gets represented on disk.
See this screenshot: The user isn't browsing files, they are browsing contacts: http://scrap.dasgenie.com/images/017-TimeMachine.png [dasgenie.com]
TM is implemented as file-based backup (with a few less common twists), but that isn't how the UI presented to the user. Without the UI, it's Yet Another Backup Solution.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm too lazy to do any research... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm too lazy to do any research... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, most importantly hard links on directories were added to the OS so that entire unchanged directory trees would not be reproduced. This significantly reduces the number of files needed on the backup drive.
Hard to beat the Time Machine setup scenario: 1. Click the big ON button; 2. Pick a disk drive
Done
So ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rsync is to data what duct tape is to... well, everything else: it might not be pretty on a visual basis, but you'll be damned to find a better solution on a bang/buck basis.
Most geeks are pretty happy with duct tape and rsync. This will be difficult to change because geeks, nearly by definition, can see beauty beneath an ugly fascia.
Makes you wonder ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. The biggest advantages that I see are that you don't have to remember to do it, and that there's one central, (presumably) well-maintained backup solution instead of a million home-rolled automation attempts.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, makes me wonder ... (Score:5, Informative)
The whole point is that you don't have to do that, it happens automatically.
AND it catches all the files that you didn't think were important, but are.
AND it lets you roll the system back to the state it was in at any given time in the past (hence "time machine").
AND it takes care of any problems that can happen during backup (like "disk full", "power failure", etc.).
Re:Yeah, makes me wonder ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or another scenario that's a bit more likely (especially with email inboxes it seems), the mail database gets corrupted, and before you realize it, the automatic backup overwrites the good copy on your backup disk with the corrupt one. I know of a few people this has happened to.
Time Machine is a very good thing, and I commend Apple for it, especially since their old backup app sucked, and wasn't even included in the OS.
Now, how about getting network backups to work properly, and patching Time Machine to gracefully deal with large files?
Re: (Score:2)
I like the idea of automatic backups, but all my macs are laptops so having an external disk permanently attached is a nuisance. I would like backups to be performed whenever i'm attached to my home network, and stored on a linux server that has a stack of large drives.
Completely misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
We've had backup systems for decades. Even Windows has a more functional system than Leopard by accounts I've read. What Leopard did is make backup and restore sexy to the point that people will actually want to do it.
"Flyback" is a replacement for, well, I'm not sure what. It's certainly nowhere near Time Machine whose primary innovation was "damn gotta get me that" user-friendliness.
Re:Completely misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No Open Source Invovation here! (Score:3, Informative)
Apple did spend many months working on the interface and desing to try to make backups as
easy as possible... All the time they took was really in design time... A much smaller portion
was used in actually coding.... (Find files that have been altered from last update -> Copy Said files
to alternate drive in directory with the date as a name, make note of files that have deleted)
To Restore data go to the date of backup when data existed merge with previous dates and account for
deleted files.
Once selected copy files back to origional drive...
It really isn't a complex process... And I am not supprised that someone made it for Linux
within a couple of weeks of Leopard being public...
Apple did all the design work which was actually the hardest part the programming isn't that hard.
I would be careful for patent issues though... Apple is a big pattenter... (Espctially after
Microsoft stole their interface)
Re:No Open Source Invovation here! (Score:5, Informative)
Trivialising the technical underpinnings of Time Machine is unwise, and plays right into the hands of those who say Apple is all about show and lacks substance. In fact, the way Time Machine knows what files have been modified is really quite elegant and shouldn't be underplayed. I shan't go into the details of it all here, but if you are interested, see the relevant page [arstechnica.com] of John Siracusa's excellent review of 10.5 [arstechnica.com] over at Ars Technica.
In the meantime, you might like to consider learning how to spell.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which they stole from Xerox. Funny. I saw Woz speak, and he stated the following:
a) they toured Xerox, and saw everything they did, went home, and made it for cheaper
b) Windows "stole" their interface
c) The Creative Labs suit about the iPod interface was silly and unfounded
Hmmm? So any lawsuits AGAINST Apple are silly and unfounded. Those same lawsuits file BY Apple are great and wonderful, huh? Can someone explain this to me
hard link directories (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easier to just use rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ubuntu TimeVault (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ubuntu TimeVault (Score:4, Informative)
Just curious, is there any really good reason not to serve everything over HTTPS?
Cool (Score:2)
Looks like the Hungry Hippo release of Ubuntu will have a new application soon.
Why not a simple SCCS? (Score:5, Interesting)
The essential thing is that it should look like a file system, with direct access to the project directories at any state in development... write access to the current version, read-access to previous versions... directly accessible to any piece of code via the normal file API.
There should be no need for copying files back and forth from a central repository to a working directory.
It should be equally friendly to text and binary files. It should not take much disk space to store versions of files that have not changed at all from one project version/label/whatever to the next. It is not necessary or desirable to store just the diffs between text files; in the year 2007 we really can afford the disk space to store an entire new source file even if only a few lines in it have changed.
It should not rely on some central database that can be a central point of failure if it gets corrupted.
It should reliably serve both the functions of version control and backup. Bells and whistles in version control are less important than backup. In particular, if it's on an external drive and the CPU fails, you should be able to plug that external drive into a new CPU and go on accessing it immediately.
To those who work on hundred-engineer projects that need full-bore version control and CASE tools and so forth, peace. I'm not talking about a one-size-fits-all solution. I'm talking about a lightweight, simple, minimalist tool that as far as I know doesn't really exist today.
Re: (Score:2)
Please, if anybody knows of anything that works like this in Linux, please let me know!
Re:Why not a simple SCCS? (Score:4, Informative)
How about mounting a webdav file system with a subversion backend that has autoversioning turned on? That way, every time you write to the filesystem, SVN will make a new version. I did this for an office file server and installed track to point to the same repository. So now people have a cheap web interface to view revisions of documents.
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.2/svn.webdav.autoversioning.html [red-bean.com]
All the Mac's in the office mount the webdav repo, my linux box mounts it via fuse, and even windows has "web folders". It was kind of a fun project that turned out to be pretty useful.
--Ajay
Re: (Score:2)
Such a system would be useful but it doesn't, in my opinion, take the place of either source code control or backups.
If you're hard disk fails, you are screwed, so it's not a backu
Re: (Score:2)
Your system would make it difficult to figure out what changes were made at what points in time and what changes should be grouped together.
It would be nice to be able to roll back to any state of any file in conjunction with svn, though.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For coding use-cases or the one you mentioned--writable working tree and read-only history--it's perfect. However, there are design tradeoffs in git that may not make it *completely* suitable. Its handling of large binary files is probably a
Wombat (Score:2, Interesting)
Ubuntu has built in backup system (Score:3, Interesting)
apt-get install sbackup
Time Vault? (Score:2)
"something like"=/=real thing. technology missing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"something like"=/=real thing. technology missi (Score:2)
I wonder how long before linux does have something similar to time machine tho?
Rsync backup is not Time Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
No end-user is going to put an rsync script in their cron jobs and specify in what mounted partition to store it and then later use rsync to restore the specified files. -- if an end user understands at all what I just said of course
Time Machine's interface is revolutionary. It gives you a way of looking back in time at your own computer and does it in a fancy way consistent with the interface. It does so for any Time Machine enabled application including Mail, Address Book, i*. If you have to restore a piece of mail from backup I doubt you'll know the name of the file it was stored in rsync or any other type of backup let alone knowing how to restore it without removing all the new messages.
Why did we always have to be bashing users for not creating their backups again? Because it was too difficult and too time consuming to make them. Time Machine takes literally 30 seconds to set up and the rest is automated. That's why people will start making backups. It's not difficult anymore and it's going to save me a lot of headaches.
Just my 2c.
Apple is brilliant (Score:2, Insightful)
All linux users should tip their hat to Apple for renewing the interest in better backup solutions.
This is why free software rules.
And also why we need companies like Apple who raise the bar.
rdiff-backup (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Meh. (Score:2)
1.) A backup system compatible with rdiff-backup, or at least as simple as rdiff-backup (i.e. the incremental copy, minus one folder, can be the latest snapshot)
2.) Make it work with gamin, so that backups are automatic
3.) Make 'thumbs' for files it understands, and store those as well
END RESULT: Who needs Leopard?
Re: (Score:2)
Restore support in Linux installer (Score:4, Interesting)
Not an rsync expert by any means but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
R1Soft! (Score:2, Informative)
Rsnapshot (Score:4, Informative)
Rsnapshot is an rsync-and-hard-links based scheme that also doesn't store duplicate data, and provides nice date-indexed browseable full file trees, much like the way both "time machine" and this flyback gizmo are described.
I haven't been this excited since AOL re-invented "ytalk"...
Re:Rsnapshot (Score:5, Informative)
Introducing ext3cow! Time-Machine for Linux (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ext3cow.com/ [ext3cow.com]
Ext3cow is an open-source, versioning file system based on ext3. It provides a time-shifting interface that allows a real-time and continuous view of the past. This allows users to access their file system as it appeared at any point in time.
Ext3cow was designed as a platform for regulatory compliance, and has been used to implement secure deletion, authenticated encryption, and incremental authentication. See the publications page for more details.
Some advantages of ext3cow:
1.
It does not pollute the name space with named versions
2.
It has low storage and performance overhead
3.
It is totally modular, requiring no changes to kernel or VFS interfaces
What's so new about Time machine? (Score:4, Insightful)
Both of those windows-based solutions, which have been out for quite some time, allow you to restore an individual file or folder from a wide range of dates. My setup backups files at midnight and 9am everyday, and I can any version of a file going back nearly 3 months. If I were to reduce the backups to once daily, 6 months of version changes on each file is plausible.
example: http://www.steveallwine.com/images/previousversions.jpg [steveallwine.com]
The only arguement I can find about why Time machine is innovative is comparisons between it and system restore on the PC. Since these are two entirely different functions, I don't understand why its brought up.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Other Things Missing (Score:5, Insightful)
A number of people have pointed out some of the major deficiencies of this software in comparison to Time Machine. There are a couple of items, however, that no one seems to be mentioning and which I think will have some of the biggest, long term effects. First, Time Machine includes easy APIs so that other programs can access the stored data from within their application. Second, it is included in the standard install so developers can rely upon it being there.
Why does this matter? Think of all the applications in which versioning would be really nice, but it just isn't available. Your address book, for example can look up old contacts or numbers or addresses. Your development tools can automatically load an older, version of that code you're writing to recover that function you did not think was needed anymore, even if you did not write it to a versioning server. Your video games can take you back to older saved games or versions of characters before you sold that really cool item. Photoshop, Word, OpenOffice, etc. can use it to revert changes to a file all the way back to last month.
The difference is that while many users will never take the trouble to learn how to use a backup system and properly recover an old version of a file, they might trouble to plug in a Time Machine drive and then use the interface to backed up versions from with their applications. It seems strange that everyone is ignoring the cool new API for developers and concentrating on the integration in the finder, which will probably be the lesser used portion of Time Machine.
Re:Innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
> catch up with Apple and use something like "spaces"
>
> their shit. Think about it!
> wowwww man!!! wooooowww!!! That's innovative!!!
> We *REALLY* need that for Linux!
You're not taking this well, are you?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Time Machine is for recovering old versions of files on a whim.
Ghost is for restoring an entire system to a certain state.
more oblig (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Warning! Do Not Use! (Score:4, Funny)
"That's not a gloryhole, that's a..."
(Who didn't know that was coming?)