Every now and then, I feel the need to completely redesign this site. Now is one of those times. I’ve also taken this opportunity to finally merge all my Tech Recs into this site.

It goes without saying, but I’m looking forward to the upcoming release of Apple’s Leopard operating system. There’s many new features, but I think one which they really nailed is Time Machine, which is described well in a nice article by AppleInsider. In it’s simplest use, Time Machine is a an extremely easy to use backup software. Most people don’t back up their computers, and it’s no surprise. Most of the time things computers work fine…except when they don’t. Having been a victim of hard drive crashes several times, I’ve become a appropriately maniacal about backing up. Now that all my photos (and soon videos) exist only in digital form, this becomes increasingly important.

Backing up has become considerably less painful since hard drive prices have plummeted in recent years. The only practical way to backup these days is to buy a hard drive equivalent in size to your main data storage and duplicate your data on a regular basis; I do it nightly. You can get away with buying a slightly smaller drive and copying only the essential files, but it’s not really worth it. You can also use fancy mechanisms like a RAID that automatically keeps a copy of itself in real time, but I find this method makes it to easy to accidentally delete a file that’s important only to have it instantly deleted from your backup as well.

AppleInsider does a nice job with the ins and outs of Time Machine, but the basic idea is that it backs up your computer automatically once you assign a backup drive. After you’ve done one full backup, it will only backup what’s changed since the last time you backed up. It does this hourly, in the background, without you having to do anything. What’s great is that, space permitting, it keeps “snapshots” of the your hard drive at various points in time, so you can go back to retrieve a file you deleted a few months ago if there’s enough space to keep it around (hence the name “Time Machine”.

Apple’s magic, as usual, is not as much in the technology as in the interface, which interoperates with other programs. If you activate Time Machine while running iPhoto, the interface is optimized for finding old photos. If you activate it while performing a search, you can search various time points in the past. You can also do the traditional restore of your entire hard drive in the event of a crash.

October 26 is the rumored release date for this next version of the Mac operating system.

October 12 has passed, and with it the NIH K23 grant deadline. Fedex receipt in hand, I’m going to catch up on some sleep…