Time Machine Review

Hey guys, is Mac heads on a 10? What's that? Oh, what am I doing? Oh, I'm just using my new… this new thing called Time Machine. You might have known about it from Leopard. Um, I'll just explain it to you.

So, Time Machine is this wonderful thing where basically you get an external hard drive or anything that doesn't already have anything on it. And basically, or you can get a Time Capsule over Wi-Fi and format it to work with Time Machine on the Mac. Once it's formatted, you can plug it in, and Time Machine basically backs up all your stuff to it.

Now, Time Machine supposedly backs everything up every hour of every day while your computer's turned on and hooked up to the drive in some way. Now you might be wondering, "Does this take up a lot of space?" Say I have a hundred gigabytes used, and say my drive has 200 gigabytes. After two hours, doesn't that seem like all 200 gigabytes will be taken up? Well, the answer there is no. Time Machine is actually pretty advanced in the way that it basically goes through, and the first time you use Time Machine, it backs up every single file on your computer to your hard drive.

So if you have 100 gigabytes used on your computer, it backs all 100 gigabytes up to your external hard drive. But after that, any files that you’ve already have, it does enough to copy over again; it just does something called symbolic links. It makes a link to an old backup of the file.

So say I change, I back up all my files the first time on Time Machine, then I go ahead and I back up all my files again some other time in Time Machine. Well, say I changed one file between the time I backed up the first time and the time I backed up the other time. Then it would just make every file a link to the old copy of the files in that new backup, except for that one file I changed. The more files you move or change, the longer it takes to back up.

I had a few videos and complex stuff on my desktop, and then I backed up again, and it's taking a long time to back up. As you can see, this is just the Time Machine system preferences panel. The first time you hook up Time Machine, you have to select the disk, and if it's not formatted for Time Machine, you have to format it. Most external USB drives, like this one I'm using here, have to be reformatted; unfortunately, um, so that deletes everything on.

Also, Time Machine, it will take a long time to back up a lot of data, like nine point three gigabytes; it's taking a pretty long time to back up. But not as long as it would take to copy over to some website or zip it and then upload it somewhere. But now, not only is it good at saving space on your external hard drive and backing up every single hour, it has a great GUI.

And that GUI allows you to go back an hour, and that's why it's called Time Machine, because it really simulates a time machine. I mean, you can take your computer back in time to your old files and forward in time again and bring files back from the past up to your present machine. It can't go forward, but wouldn't that be great? You could just go into the future where your homework is done, just copy it.

But anyway, so Time Machine is really good at doing that stuff. And then you can see in the system preference pane it has this kind of stuff, and you actually need a password to unlock the system preference pane considering it backs up all the users' files and other users' files and everything. You can also change the disk it backs up to. I'm going to click cancel, and you can also set options like files it won't back up.

I'm not going to back up Time Machine backups, because that's where it backs everything out first. It would back up to that, then back that up, and it would just go on forever and mess everything up. So now, right here, it's finished backing up, and I can turn it on or off. I like it on.

So right here, we have this little thing in the menu bar. You can click backup now, enter Time Machine, and open Time Machine preferences. I already showed you the Time Machine preferences, so I'll click enter Time Machine now to open a Finder window with your desktop. Now open it in Time Machine.

Now, I've had a few backups. You can see by this timeline here are all the times I've backed up, right up to now. So this is my current files. This is my files of my last backup, backup before that, backup before that. I can go all the way back to my first backup a few hours ago, maybe two hours ago. So I can click this button to go back, and of course, say I have a file.

Let's just find the file right here. I'll just take this file—kind of stupid—and they'll go, and I'll select that file, maybe I'll just do this .txt file, and I'll click restore. Now it drags that file up to my current… to my current thing, and if it already exists, I'll just click replace, and I've replaced that file. So that's pretty cool.

Also, there is basically whenever you feel like it, you can—if you've been working on one file—you can back it up. This will also back up your applications. So let me demonstrate this to you in the GUI. I'll just go way back. If you go into applications, it does back up all your applications. You will back up anything that begins in shot.

So if you have our program Finder, you can see every hidden file. Time Machine, I believe, does back that up. I'll see right now; we'll find out if it actually does. So we'll just configure Finder to show hidden files. Now, let's say there are a few hidden files on my desktop. I'll open up Time Machine.

So, let's see right here. It has, in fact, backed up all these files—all the dot files, all the configuration files. It's backed up all the hidden files and all the setting files. It's also backed up all the system files. Like here's the first backup of mine. If you go into it, you see it's backed up every single thing, like Etsy. It's backed up applications, of course, it's backed up system library.

If you go into system, go into library, it's backed up everything in here, all the way to core services. It also backs up your personal library, so that includes all the widgets you've installed and all the settings for all your programs. So you can restore like all your files. I'll just go into my library folder. This has all my preferences, so you can see right here—here are some preferences for my online games that I've been playing. I just like to play games online.

So let me just show you here a few. I mostly play them on my website, but um, right here, you can see here all the settings for all my different games. You can see here are some settings for a game, and so that's really convenient. You can also—you can't access any of the shared drives or any network drives. That can still change—doesn't back those up, but it will back up, say, you have a Windows partition. I believe it does back that up.

If it doesn't, feel free to correct me, but I think it does. It backs up applications, like it backs up everything pretty much. Um, it's wonderful. And this timeline isn't all the backups you can have. If it gets longer, you can scroll up, but I haven't gotten to that point yet.

I'll just come to now. I'll just click right here. So this is for… and after a while, you just start getting used to being able to say, "Oh, I lost the file, I'll just go back and back it up." I deleted the whole match-ups on our own website; I just went back here, got it. So this is pretty simple.

Also, on your most recent version, it will show you all the drives or Time Machine backups, but none of the other windows be available because this drive hasn't been backed up anywhere else. But Macintosh HD has been backed up. But say I make a new folder right here on my desktop, new folder Joe. Then let's go ahead and copy this.

This should only take a few seconds. I'll just open Time Machine preferences to show you it's already backed up. So now there's a new file on my desktop called Joe. Boo, okay, enter Time Machine. Whatever. So now, I have three backups that have the folder Joe and current.

So right here, I can go to my desktop; we just open my desktop, and I can open up Joe. But now, you only see these three backups that contained the folder Joe. The backups behind this hadn't even contained the folder Joe, which is too bad.

So, you cannot delete a backup. Once you've made a backup, you can't delete it, which is a shame because I have these three useless backups, but who cares? Well, anyway, so that's pretty cool. You can also go back here all the way back still, and you can have a whole lot of backups.

Look, if one file changes every time you do a backup, maybe I'll use another hundred gigabytes in, let's say about, I don't know, a year and a half. I'll still have a lot of space on this. I mean, I'd still be backing up every hour; it will be fine. Only a teeny bit of space gets used up every backup that doesn't have any difference between files because it's just the text for the symbolic link files.

Um, it's very little, so it's almost nothing. So, um, if you have a 400, 500-gig external USB driver, even buy a professional Time Capsule from Apple—it’s like two terabytes—even you could have some serious fun. You can back up all your stuff; it's pretty cool. Just peel the backup; it's a little security.

So, um, thank you for watching. My kids under one, subscribe, and goodbye.