Time Machine saves the day
I was working on a new design for the site the other day on my local machine when for some strange reason I couldn’t load the site. Nothing I tried worked. Even the main root folder wasn’t showing with the default Apache page. ‘Shite’ I thought to myself. I tried re-starting web sharing, nothing. I tried repairing permissions, nothing. Uh oh! All the data was still in the Webserver folder so I couldn’t figure it out. Then I remembered that I had been playing around with Virtual Hosts and their configuration. A couple of days earlier I had setup a virtual host on my machine and promptly forgot about it. Lots of editing of httpd.conf and http-vhosts.conf. Turns out my editing was flawed and I’d rightly buggered the files.
Luckily Time Machine had a pre-edit copy of each file backed up on my external hard drive. I had changed my Time Machine setup to only backup once every 24 hours as opposed to the default hourly backups. The file from the day before the edits were made was backed up, ready and waiting to be restored. Two clicks later and the files were restored and Apache was working normally. So quick and yet so simple. It’s this pure ease of use that makes Apple leaders in their field.
And now that Time Capsule has launched, Time Machine will become even more useful. Especially for notebooks but even handier for backing up multiple machines to one place. All wirelessly with almost no effort required on the users part. Ingenious!
As we all know, everyone should backup, backup regularly and ensure those backups work, thankfully Apple have made this process so simple that there really is no excuse for not backing up your data. As the song said, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
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