I used to be a mac hater, and I had my very good reasons for that. I used to think that only snobs and queers buy a mac, just to show off because where I lived Apple had so little market share it was almost non-existent and their computers were so expensive I couldn’t believe anyone would ever buy one for serious use, like work, games or whatever people do with their computers these days.

There was this price gap where a normal PC laptop would cost $600 and a Macintosh went for over $2000. I know it was a small country with a small market and as such the retailers thought they’d get away with some grossly overpriced products as long as they can talk to the people who have the money and want to show it off. Macs used to be the X5 BMW of computers, the thing only the rich buys and even they don’t know what to do with it.

This brings up the point of Macintosh data recovery, who would think about that when the egregious prices leave no direct access to the computer itself. Fortunately since I’m living in London I’ve changed my mind and I had a look at the hardware and the software, and came to realize that it’s all a nicely designed and engineered setup, which I absolutely have to have. Since there is no better hardware setup for the price I realized I will have to find some software solutions for the platform before paying the money.

Call me paranoid, but the first thing I checked was data recovery options available. I know this is not the most important aspect but I had my share of dead hard drives and I absolutely want to keep my work safe. Everything I do is on my computer and I would most definitely get a heart attack if all my work went poof after accidentally dropping the unit or a spike on the power network.

Mac OSX has the field covered, so to speak. There is thing I came to understand, called time machine. If you connect an external hard disk drive via usb or firewire you will be able to use it as a backup drive. Time machine is preinstalled on all recent macs and you will be able to find it through finder. What it does, and does perfectly, is taking an initial snapshot of your current files, puts it on the external drive and every hour it looks at your files again to see if there is any difference yet.

When it finds something that needs to be saved it simply attaches it to the full snapshot, this way it barely takes any space. You can set an exact time and date in time machine and it will let you use the files present at that very time like you would be able to use your physically present data.

Very convenient, very fast, the guys in Cupertino really gave a moment of their time designing this system, and while I’m still using this PC at this moment I wish I had my new macbook pro, not only for this superb backup solution, but I have to admit this is another firm nail in the coffin of my days as a PC user.