So what is Time Machine you ask? Its an automated way to back up your entire hard drive on the fly. If you make a change, Time Machine will back it up. So how does this happen? Well, first you will need either a 2nd hard drive installed internally if you have a PowerMac or Mac Pro, or you can use a FireWire or USB 2.0 external hard drive. When you plug in an external hard drive with Leopard installed for the first time, Time Machine will come up and ask if you want to configure it for use. If you choose yes, Time Machine will do the rest of the work for you. Time Machine will automatically backup your changed files every hour from the last backup. The very first backup will take some time, but the others shouldn't unless you have a lot of data on a daily basis to back up. Everything is done on the fly in the background.
So what makes Time Machine so special? Well have you ever opened up a Word document, Excel Spreadsheet, or Keynote presentation to use as kind of a template. You make the proper modifications to suit your needs and then go to file and save, but you meant to do a save as and you just overwrote the original document. With Time Machine, you can just go back to the last time it was backed up and restore either right back where it was. Since Time Machine backs everything up, from the OS itself, to preferences, applications, documents, movies, bookmarks, emails, etc you can restore an entire hard drive if your internal one goes dead. Simply boot from the Leopard installer DVD and the installer will ask if you want to restore from a Time Machine backup. This puts you nearly right back where you left off before your hard drive died. Another example of Time Machine is if you're doing a search using Spotlight and it doesn't find what you're looking for, you can click on the Time Machine icon on the Dock and it will do a search in realtime for whatever you searched in Spotlight and come up with the most recent result. This is pretty handy if you've accidentally deleted something. It also works for other applications other than the Finder. It can work for any of Apple's apps such as iPhoto, or any 3rd party application. So as you can see, Time Machine can become a very handy tool for basically anyone. You can restore individual files, or an entire hard drive. This is just one of many major new additions to Leopard.
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