We certified members of the Mincey Clan are red, white, and blue science fiction devotees. Sure, we’re into SyFy, but also BBC.
I have to laugh at the BBC running on American cable TV companies. It’s been billed as “Television from the Other Side.” It’s also where we can watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. And Dr. Who, the time lord who travels using a buggy time machine called TARDIS Here’s one for your Mac.
The Mac’s Time Machine
Time Machine on the Mac is Apple’s default application for backing up files. All you need is an external disk of appropriate size and Time Machine keeps every file backed up (most of the time).
Finding a lost file in Time Machine is almost fun. Almost. Time Machine expects you to know where the lost file once was. And Time Machine isn’t likely to divulge much information about itself or your files.
That’s where the Back-In-Time app comes in very handy. Back-In-Time is what Time Machine should be in the future, but available now.
From within a familiar and similar user interface, Back-In-Time lets you dig into any folder to find any file that Time Machine has saved; even on Time Machine from other Macs, or from Time Capsule.
Back-In-Time can open up multiple Time Machine-like window browsers and displays more information, including how many versions of each file were backed up and available, when they were saved, which and when they were deleted, and plenty of other useful information that Time Machine tracks and stores, but which doesn’t make available.
Back-In-Time looks familiar, but is a bit easier to use than Time Machine because it displays popular file locations in the sidebar. Click on one to see which files were saved by Time Machine.
Restoring a file is little more than drag and drop. That makes Back-In-Time easier to use for anyone who has an extensive Time Machine backup but who laments the trial and error nature of finding lost files using Apple’s Mac backup utility.
