BW: Portability and Time Machine Don’t Mix

November 7th, 2007 at 2:00 PM - News by John Martellaro

Arik Hesseldahl at BusinessWeek on Thursday said heis delighted that Apple created Time Machine, but it has one glaring weakness. Itis not so great for people on the move.

Time Machine "...is probably the most talked-about and eagerly anticipated feature in Leopard. Iim probably not alone in having struggled with the finer points of backing up important data. I canit begin to count the money Iive spent on external hard drives and various software applications that promise to automate the backup process," Mr. Hesseldahl lamented.

However, now that heis started using Time Machine, and while heis delighted with it, using it with a notebook, constantly on the go, is somewhat of a problem. "Of the 7 million Macs sold in the fiscal year that ended in September, 4.3 million were notebooks. And if your Mac of choice is one of these notebooks, using Time Machine is a slightly more arduous process....youill need to carry an external hard drive with you," the author noted.

The problem is that Time Machine is not yet compatible with networked drives. "After first hearing about Time Machine I had visions of setting up one huge networked drive that could store a terabyte of data and letting Time Machine make convenient backups to it from my MacBook Pro via Wi-Fi," The noted Mac observer wrote. "Until and unless Time Machine supports network drives, it will remain just a vision."

Mr. Hesseldalh had some other minor complaints, but he remained enthusiastic. "In short, I love Leopard, though not without reservations. And I am confident that Apple can fix the systemis shortcoming fairly easily," he said.