On backup
The most important announcement at yesterday's Macworld Expo keynote presentation is widely considered to be the three-pound MacBook Air. The Macworld Best of Show awards list it and another ten products from the show that it considers most significant.
Everyone is wrong.
Apple's Time Capsule is an Airport Express base station with a big hard drive in it. You tell your OS X 10.5 Leopard systems that the Time Capsule is there and they all start backing themselves up to it whenever you're in wireless range.
This is the very first backup system in existence that you could mail to your proverbial aunt. It's also among the first that backs up continuously (the Right Way). Its only rivals are online backup services like mozy.com, which are nice because they're offsite but require subscriptions and therefore can't be mailed to your aunt.
(Assume a Time Capsule has a useful life of four years. TC costs $75/year for 500GB and $125/year for 1TB, while unlimited mozyhome service costs $60 per computer. TC is cheaper if you have two 10.5 Macs and less that 500GB total, or more than two Macs and less than 1TB total. TC should be faster, better integrated into the OS, and easier to use. Mozy supports Windows and 10.4 Macs and will survive if your office is disintegrated. They both have a place.)
Most people don't do proper backups. These people have data that doesn't realize it's dead yet. Some of us go to considerable effort to do backups, but we usually have to compromise on offsite-ness, frequency, or what gets backed up and what doesn't - and all of these increase risk significantly. Time Capsule is a significant advance in these terms. Offsite backup is problematic and storage is not as expandable as it might be, but it's the best backup appliance yet and integrated OS support is a huge advantage.
A Backup Manifesto:
- A disk-based backup appliance should be an option line on any computer configurator, selected by default.
- Backup appliances on a local network should be autodetectable.
- Backup software should ship and be installed with the base OS, and do versioned automatic backups to backup appliance or remote backup server with minimal-to-zero configuration.
- Mirroring backups to an offsite backup appliance should be as simple to set up as IM file transfer, which works across firewalls and isn't conceptually more complicated.
- Backup transfer protocols should be standard cross-platform.
- Security is about protection from loss, not necessarily about being 0wned. Backup is a security problem. Windows nags you about firewalls, security updates and virus protection and blithely ignores backup which is more important than any two of those. This is negligence. Microsoft (and other vendors, including Linux vendors) get away with it because people blame themselves for failing to back up.