Time Machine

Contributor: Kevin Koshy Thomas

Time Machine is a backup utility announced and first demonstrated on August 7, 2006 at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, and is scheduled to be included with the Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" operating system.

After initial setup, Time Machine creates daily incremental backups of all files on the system, allowing files to be restored from a specific dates in the past. Although Time Machine backs up at the file level, data can be restored not only from the Finder but also from within applications such as Address Book, iPhoto, etc. The underlying technology will also be made available for implementation in 3rd-party applications. Time Machine can backup to internal or external disks that are connected by USB or Firewire. It can also back up to networked drives, including those connected wirelessly by the Airport Extreme N router. The drives must be formatted with the Mac OS extended file system.

Users may also change several settings relating to Time Machine's backups. These include:

• Changing the volume or device to which Time Machine backs up files and settings.
• Excluding specific files from being backed up or to exclude all system files, thus leaving it to only backup personal files.
• Changing the time at which Time Machine creates back ups and how long it keeps the old files (from 2 weeks to 1 year).