Yesterday, I checked the Alesis site, as I have religeously about once a fortnight, for a final version of the new drivers for my Alesis Multimix Firewire audio interface. You see… I’ve had OS X 10.5 Leopard waiting in the wings for a few months, ready to be unleashed on my iMac. However, up until 28th January, there was only a beta version of the new Multimix drivers, which brought compatibility with Leopard. Until then, If I’d upgraded, it would have been a beta version of the drivers I would have had to use. Various forum entries showed that the beta drivers wern’t bad, but needed finalizing. Happily, on 28th January, that happened. I didnt pick up the fact until yesterday, but when I did, they immediately got installed at Studio Axeman. They seemed fine after a bit of testing, so I decided to bite the bullet and install Leopard.
I did an upgrade rather than a new install, as all OS X upgrades I’ve ever done before have gone fine. Luckily, it was still the case with this one, and within about 90 mins, everything was done, and Apple’s latest OS was finally mine to play with. All my apps seem to be happy (thusfar), including (most importantly) Logic Studio and Photoshop CS3. I’m overall quite impressed by the features, but most of them could have ben missed off and it wouldn’t have been a major issue. However one of the features of the new OS is definitely worth a look. That feature?
Time Machine!
Time Machine is Apple’s new backup and archiving app. It needs a complete HDD (or partition) to do its business. You plug a new HDD in (a nice Seagate 500Gb in my case – got from PC World this morning!), and it asks you if you want to use it for Time Machine. You just click yes, and it goes away and backs up your entire system. It uses a system of ‘exclusion’ rather than ‘inclusion’ to deine what is backed up. this is good, as it means that you dont need to add new folders to a list in order for them to be backed up. By default, it excludes all external drives, but as I keep all my photos and music on an external drive, I changed this so just the folders that weren’t important on that drive got excluded instead.
Once its completed its first major backup (a few hours at least for most people’s systems), it backs up any changed files once an hour. All very clever. You can force this at any time too. You can restore from these backups in one of several ways. Firstly, you can go back as far as time machine has backed up, and restoer single files, seeing how folders appeared on certain dates etc. You can also use the Leopard boot CD to install the OS again, and use a time machine backup to restore the entire system to a particular date. This means that if your internal HDD dies, you should have a backup (automatically) within the last hour which you can restore from.
Wow! This is a fundamentally great product. I know there are other apps that do similar things, but none is so tightly intertwined with the OS. This means that if any of my external drives or my internal drive, decide to die, then I know I have a backup within the last hour from which I can restore. Blimey!
It means layout on an external drive (or potentially another internal drive if you use a Mac Pro), but to me, that’s small price to pay for peace of mind, especially with prices of storage tumbling like they are at the moment. Even if you currently backup manually, I’d still challenge (most) people to declare that they back up religeously, like they should. I’m guessing most people don’t. the problem is, its always when you havent made a recent backup that everything decides to go belly-up. I’ve been a bit worried about my LaCie firewire drive for a while now, as it;s 3 years old, and could give up the ghost at any time. Seeing as its the place I store all my photos, I’m kind of concerned that I’ve got some kind of backup!
I’m yet to see how it affects recording performance. That is the only hangup I have about this product. However, my guess is that it’ll only have a minimal impact, as the hourly backups are only to changed files, so the hit should be minimal (hopefully!).
We shall see!