. Time Machine As the old saying goes, there are two kinds of people: those who have a regular backup system—and those who will. | . Time Machine As the old saying goes there are two kinds of people those who have a regular backup system and those who will. You ll get that grisly joke immediately if you ve ever known the pain that comes with deleting the wrong folder by accident or making changes that you regret or worst of all having your hard drive die. All those photos all that music you ve bought online all your email gone. Yet the odds are overwhelming that at this moment you do not have a complete current automated backup of your Mac. Despite about a thousand warnings articles and cautionary tales a year guess how many do About four percent. Everybody else is flying without a net. If you don t have much to back up you don t have much in the way of photos music or movies you can get by with burning copies of stuff onto blank CDs or DVDs Chapter 11 or using the .Mac Backup program described at the end of this chapter. But those methods leave most of your Mac unprotected all your programs and settings not to mention Mac OS X itself. What you really want of course is a backup that s rock-solid complete and automatic. You don t want to have to remember to do a backup to insert a tape to find a cartridge. You just want to know that you re safe. That s the idea behind Time Machine a marquee feature of Leopard. It s a silent set it-and-forget-it piece of peace of mind. You sleep easy knowing there s a safety copy of your entire system your system files programs settings music pictures videos document files everything. Yes Time Machine has a fabulous gorgeous sci-fi space-themed recovery mode where it looks like you re flying back in time to retrieve files folders or disks from the past. With luck you ll never need it. But if your luck runs out you ll be so happy you set Time Machine up. . Setting up Time Machine Here s the bad news Time Machine requires a second hard drive. That s the only way to create a completely safe automatic backup of your entire main hard drive. That second hard .
