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Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 7 BACKUP, SYNCHRONIZATION, AND RECOVERY OF DATA 137<br />

NOTE When deciding whether to invest in an external hard drive for Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine to use, ask<br />

yourself how much the data you keep on your computer is worth. You can easily find a nicesized<br />

external hard drive these days for less than $100, and in our opinion, our data is worth at<br />

least that.<br />

NOTE If you are desperate, you can set up Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine to back up to a different partition<br />

on your primary hard drive. Although this will provide some protection of your data as well as<br />

a nice historical archive of data, this will do nothing if your hard drive fails.<br />

To set up Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine, you open the Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine pane in System Preferences (Figure 7-2).<br />

Click the Configure button to pick an attached volume for Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine to use, and then, if<br />

you’d like, add any volumes or folders you don’t want Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine to back up. Finally, you<br />

have the options of skipping backing up system files and having your backup occur automatically.<br />

Skipping system files isn’t such a bad idea, since if something really bad happens, you’ll<br />

need to reinstall the system anyway and you have that on your DVD. The automatic backups are<br />

a personal preference. If you remember to back up manually (by clicking the Back Up Now button),<br />

then that’s fine. If, however, you just don’t want to think about it, leave the automatic<br />

backup checked.<br />

Figure 7-2. The Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine preference pane provides configuration options for Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine.<br />

NOTE Once Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine is active, you can select individual items within the Finder and<br />

choose whether to include or exclude them from Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine backups in either the Get Info<br />

window or the contextual menu.<br />

Once Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine is initially set up, it may take a bit of time to make the initial backup,<br />

but after that, the backups will be relatively short (unless you are doing backups manually and<br />

infrequently or you use a portable and attach your backup drive only every now and then).<br />

However, once things are moving, Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine is ready when you need it.<br />

When you launch Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine, your desktop will fade away, and you will be brought into<br />

the Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine interface. If you launch Time <strong>Mac</strong>hine from the Finder, then a Finder window

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