Plus, I sync valuable files between Macs and copying some files off premise, away from home and office. Like many Mac users, I welcomed Time Machine as a handy complement to my backup strategy.

There’s just one problem with Time Machine. Yes, once you set up Time Machine on an appropriately sized hard disk, it just works. Time Machine backs up all your files, then backs up files that have changed.

Time Machine is truly a set it and forget utility. It works. Yes, right after Leopard’s launch, some of us had problems with hard disk size, and some disks that didn’t play nice nice with Time Machine.

But once I got it set up on a couple of Macs, it just worked. After a week or so I checked back in time to see files I had deleted were still stored in Time Machine. Great. What me worry?

I backup Documents, Music, Photos, and other files regularly using ChronoSync, and regularly clone my Mac’s hard disks using SuperDuper! (still not ready for Leopard), so Time Machine was a no cost extra way to track and find files.

Did I mention that it just works. Your mileage may vary, of course, but Time Machine as been as Apple said. “Set it, then forget it.” Therein lies the rub. I forgot about it.

Time Machine continually monitors your Mac’s files. Every hour, every day, incremental backups are made. Hourly backups to days. Daily backups for the past month. Weekly backups for anything older than a month. If you create and then delete a file before the next hourly backup, that file won’t get backed up.

Time Machine has a few options. You can select a specific hard disk to use for Time Machine’s backups. You can also exclude certain files or folders you want to skip in the backup process, so there’s some level of control. If you go to the trouble.

My guess is that most Mac users, me included, simply got Time Machine running, checked it out, found that it worked OK, then forgot about it.

The other day I was checking my Mail inbox, deleting some messages, moving others. On a whim, I clicked on Time Machine to see what it would show me. There it was in the Time Machine window-- nearly a month of Mail inboxes streaking back in time on my Mac.

So I checked the inbox from two weeks earlier. Guess what? All those email message I thought I had deleted were still there, biding their time in Time Machine.

Uh oh, I thought. What else is Time Machine keeping that I really don’t want to keep? Not only does Time Machine keep every Mail message it can find, even those you thought you deleted, it also remembers Safari bookmarks.

Yep, the Safari Bookmark plist file from weeks ago remained intact, dutifully saved each day by Time Machine. How about Safari’s History plist? Time Machine saved that, too.

You may have thought you cleared Safari’s History or cleared out some bookmarks, but they’re still in your Mac, protected by Time Machine for posterity.

Therein lies a basic danger in Time Machine. Set it and forget it. Except that Time Machine doesn’t forget it, leaving on your Mac some information which could be sensitive, embarrassing, even dangerous. Information you thought had been deleted, but wasn’t. That Guest account in Leopard is looking awfully good, huh?

Time Machine requires a big hard disk, and a big disk means a huge number of files can be stored. Whether those files are valuable, useless, or dangerous, Time Machine doesn’t care. With the good comes a little bad.

Is it time for Mac software developers to find a way to prune some of Time Machine’s hourly and daily collections with an handy utility? Yes. I’m up for that. How many Mac users know where their Safari bookmarks and history files are kept? How many would know how to set up Time Machine so that it does not backup deleted Mail files?

I love Time Machine, but I’m beginning to see a need to exercise some caution when Apple provides Mac users with a “set it, then forget it” feature.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

Off Topic #23 & #18 - Want to speed up your Mac? Try Kate MacKenzie’s approach to the $7.99 speed increase. Do you have a back up system for your Mac? Kate’s PixoBebo shows you how to use Time Machine with SuperDuper! for the ultimate Mac back up. And she doesn’t even charge Mac360 readers to visit her site.

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• Article by Ron McElfresh • Published on Thursday, November 29, 2007
• Category: Opinion • 6 Reader comment(s) • Email This • Digg This • Shop Now

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Readers Talk Back:

PRO~DUAL~INTEL~3/GIGAHERTZ says:

Just don’t try to use time machine with a “usb 2.0 external hard drive” that method kept giving me hell. I have the Mac Pro desktop and finally decided to use one of my four internal hard drives for time machine. Works like a champ now.

— Posted on Tue Dec 04 at 1:36 pm by PRO~DUAL~INTEL~3/GIGAHERTZ

Richard Hallmark says:

Not quite sure what I said that was considered inflammatory but I’ll apologize anyway. As for the Editor’s Note, it’s also a bit inflammatory.

Iggy pense,

I would suggest that it is an excellent catastrophic back for its intended audience. I have worked with a number of clients who are confused by the user interface of any of the backup programs that have been around for a while. It takes a matter of seconds for them to understand Time Machine. Simplicity has virtues.

I would caution that “a backup hour in Time Machine” is not the time frame of real importance. It needs to make it through a backup day before it will last for at least a month.

— Posted on Fri Nov 30 at 12:31 pm by Richard Hallmark

Ron McElfresh says:

Jim, thanks. Fixed. Camino had the little red squiggly lines below the word, indicating that it was misspelled. Maybe I need a new glasses.

Note - Time Machine utilities are on the way. One of the first is Time Machine Scheduler. Look for more in the future as Mac developers figure out ways to improve Time Machine.

— Posted on Fri Nov 30 at 11:46 am by Ron McElfresh

iggy pence says:

Is there such a thing as an “all purpose” backup? What would that be?

It seems to me that Time Machine has a different approach to backing up files than, say Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, both of which are different than Retrospect.

Time Machine could be billed as a “general” backup, as in “generally it backs up all your files from time to time.” It doesn’t clone, so it’s not a good catastrophic backup like SuperDuper.

I think you’re right, though. If I delete a message in email it’s nice to know that it’s still around if it made it through a backup hour in Time Machine. But there are times when I WANT to delete a file and know that it is actually deleted, so there is a danger there.

— Posted on Fri Nov 30 at 11:38 am by iggy pence

Jim Sheppard says:

Ron: para. 9: excluse? I think that pesky s jumped a space to the right when you were not looking.

— Posted on Fri Nov 30 at 10:46 am by Jim Sheppard

Richard Hallmark says:

Time Machine was not designed as a all purpose backup utility. Apple made it VERY clear at the last two WWDCs and on its web site that Time Machine is “Backups for Dummies” and is designed for the 80% of Mac users who have NEVER backed up their computers because it was too complicated to understand.

Think about it. Suppose you received an email and trashed it. Imagine now, two weeks later when realize that the message had the only record of the serial number for a program? Wouldn’t you be very happy to find out that Time Machine backed it up? Isn’t that what an automatic backup program SHOULD do and isn’t it exactly what a more conventional backup program like Retrospect also does? If you really need to get rid of a file in you backup it can be done on a file by file basis - something you can’t do with Retrospect.

What you call a danger, I would call a feature. Now there is a danger for novices who read about the hourly backups. If you rely on the hourly backups to last more than 24 hours you can lose files. The only files included in a daily backup (or a monthly backup for that matter) are those that exist at the time the backup is made. A file saved an deleted within the time between hourly backups will never be backed up and a file that is deleted before the next daily backup will also be lost after a day. The fact that it was in 23 hourly backups won’t help.

I would also note that at the well attended WWDC sessions on Time Machine, the Apple engineers spent a lot of time explaining how the program does some of it magic and pointed out that these tools were now a part of Leopard and could be used by other developers.

Richard K. Hallmark, Ph.D.
Certified member of the Apple Consultants Network

Editor’s Note - Edited for inflammatory content, spelling, and grammar… on second thought, we left the spelling and grammar as is. So much for the value of a higher education.

— Posted on Thu Nov 29 at 5:22 pm by Richard Hallmark

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