Saving Machine

The "Saving Machine" doesn't have anything to do with your souls, and it's not a typo either. After all, a "shaving machine" shouldn't have any link with Apple, as long as it wouldn't use some kind of Mac OS X for working properly, which is not the case here. What I am trying to say is that Leopard's builtin backup solution, known as Time Machine, will finally provide its users with a power saving feature!


If you didn't have the chance to use the Time Machine software so far, then it's enough to say this program keeps all your precious data safe on an external device, such as FireWire or USB drives, as well as on networked storage devices, like Apple's own Time Capsule. For now, the features of this program are rather limited, because you can only backup every hour, and backups are not automatically stopped when the battery is low, so data corruption can occur.

The good part is that, according to the latest inside news (nothing official, of course), Mac OS X 10.5.3 is going to improve Time Machine a lot. The latest Mac OS X Leopard build seeded to developers, labeled 10.5.3 (9D29), comes with an updated Time Machine version, which finally allows laptop users to stop background hourly backups when on battery power.

Apart from the above, the improved Time Machine software is expected to come with a lot of bug fixes, end it should reduce battery loss caused by backups performed over a Wi-Fi connection. Sounds good to me, but I guess we should wait for a while to see how the public update will fulfill all these expectations.