Time Machine Saved My Ass Again

So a couple of days ago I had a bit of a problem with my laptop. I'd just finished reading some emails at my desk at home and decided to move to the couch to continue. Now there's nothing special about this, except that when I opened the lid again nothing happened. The screen was black. It took me a couple of hard restarts to realize that the computer was working fine at the CPU level; the problem was a blown video card, I learned that a bit later, first I paniced a bit and got really pissy.

So being a MacBook Pro and still under the extended warenty (yay!) I haulled ass to the nearest Apple store where I could get an appointment at the "Genius Bar". After waiting longer than expected I was helped, and the problem was quickly diagnosed as the video card. But they can repair it in-house within 3-5 days (they don't have the card in stock).

So that's all good, the repair should be relatively fast and it is covered by the warenty, but what the hell am I going to do without my laptop for that long? After all I was in the middle of revising the lab manual ahead of the start of the semester. Fortunately I'm not all that screwed, I know a few of you were worried, it's ok to admit it.

It turns out my obsessive devotion to Apple's Time Machine program is paying off yet again. Time Machine will automatically back up your computer for you every hour, so if you delete the wrong files (say every scientific paper you ever felt was important to your research) you can restore them with a couple of clicks, even if it's been months since you deleted them. Well I'm so obsessed with the system that I'll even force it to backup before I leave work, even if the previous backup was 15 minutes prior. So when I went to work the following day without my laptop I just plugged the Time Machine hard drive into another Mac and pulled out the files that I needed, no muss, no headaches.

I have to admit that I feel that the Time Machine application is on it's own one of the best programs that you'll find on a Mac. It's unobtrusive, simple and highly effective. Sure 99% of the time you'll never use it, but the times it comes into play it'll be invaluable. Which is why I bought a 1TB Time Capsule for my lab. It's a wi-fi router with a hard drive for use with Time Machine. As it is the five Macs in my lab are all wirelessly backing up to it and I even use it to store data from the few PCs I have, too bad I can't use Time Machine on them.

Sorry for the quassi "advertorial" nature of this post, it wasn't the initial intention of post, but that's what you got.

Posted with LifeCast