Time Machine – reliable backup

I have been working in product management for almost 10 years now, and I have to admit that I have seen only a very small number of products as perfect as Time Machine. It just does, what it is supposed to do. Period.

Small story: For years I have been using TIme Machine – yes, warping a file through time is really cool, but I tend to think three times before deleting a file. Now here we are, ready to leave for two weeks of holiday and my MacBooks starts to get hick-ups. Initial disk inconsistencies could be fixed with Disk Utility, but I decided to take the Time Machine HD and my Mac OSX DVD with me.
One day into the holidays, my MacBook HD totally falls apart – no more repair, no booting anymore, and no way to load the pictures off my SLR! So I ordered a replacement HD at Amazon, and two days later the HD arrives in my holiday resort. Swapped the HD, put the Mac OS X DVD in the MacBook, and attached the Time Machine HD. You need to hold the “C” key pressed and the MacBook takes off booting from the DVD. On the install screen I selected the option to restore from a Time Machine backup and that is it!
Approximately 60 minutes later my MacBook was back – all the configurations, all the emails, all my photos, and all the programs.

This was the hot test for me: Time Machine did work perfectly for me, and it has proven to be 100% reliable. Thank you Apple!

From a product management perspective, it is interesting to see how few features Time Machine has. You have one configuration pane, where you define where you want to store your backup, and you can chose to exclude some files (like the download folder or so). That is it! No bells, no whistles. Good design is as little design as possible (Dieter Rams).