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Ever wish Time Machine™ didn't have that interface?

lamina

lamina

macrumors 68000
Original poster
I wish I could just grab from my backup volume without having to load that obstructive screen. I'm chatting with a friend and need to grab a file from my backup volume, but I don't want to load up that huge and sluggish interface that is Time Machine. Wouldn't it be nice if they could confine it to one window?
 
I just used it for the first time yesterday. I think it's ridiculous! So ugly, particularly the buttons along the bottom. They could just be normal looking buttons, do the same job, and look a lot better!
 
i think time machine could be so much better. i wish it was more customizable. meaning you could make it back up only once a day, every other day, ect. i wish you could pick what you want to back up and what you don't want to back up. if they could do that with TM i think it would make for an incredible tool
 
Eluzion said:
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the Time Machine UI either. Seems out of place with the rest of Leopard.
Click to expand...

I personally like it, and you can browse the backups directly as well from Finder which is handy.

I just wish that you could limit the maximum size used on a disk.
 
On one hand, it's a bit gaudy. On the other, they needed something that could, in no way, be confused with the normal Desktop.
 
Father Jack said:
I like the "space" effect .. 😱
But have to admit the bar at the bottom and the buttons suck .. 😡
Click to expand...

I agree I thought that only happened in my comp that bar hardly ever works for me. I hope they fix it soon ... It doesn't t bother me that much because I hardly to into space or hatevwrthat thingnis caked but if I did I would bother me a lottttt
 
basesloaded190 said:
what i meant was that instead of having to choose what you DONT want to back up, i wish you could just choose what you DO want to back up
Click to expand...

You'd be checking a hell of a lot by doing it that way.

If you just want to back up specific documents, why not do it manually instead?
 
retro83 said:
I personally like it, and you can browse the backups directly as well from Finder which is handy.

I just wish that you could limit the maximum size used on a disk.
Click to expand...
Partition the disk to give Time Machine the space you want it to have.

basesloaded said:
i wish you could pick what you want to back up and what you don't want to back up. if they could do that with TM i think it would make for an incredible tool
Click to expand...
While that would offer more flexibility, why don't you want to have Time Machine back up (almost) everything by default.

I've specifically excluded the Podcasts folder for iTunes -- no need to store those. And I created a "scratch" folder that isn't backed up for when I'm doing video editing. I don't want multiple GB of temp video to be saved while being transcoded.
 
Eh.. it's not a standard interface, but I still think it's cool.. 😀

What really gets me is I can't find how to turn Time Machine off! I've looked all over in the preferences, to no avail. They should just put a huge on/off slider that is easy to see. 🙄
 
I don't use Time Machine yet but will be soon and have a few questions...

- Time Machine mirrors you're computers hard drive, right. Well if you delete or edit a file on you're computer would the same not happen on you're Time Machine backup?

- Or does it save multiple versions of your files? I'm going to get a external hard drive (question thread) and was going to leave 320GB (the same as my iMac) for Time Machine and the rest of the space for manual storage. But if it saves multiple file backups would I need to leave more space?

- If you browse a previous version of a file or folder in Time Machine and click restore does it overwrite the version of the file or folder that it on the Mac itself? So say you edited a file, then made some new files, but then wanted to revert to the original file. Would TM just bring back that file and leave everything else in that folder as it is?

Thanks
 
basesloaded190 said:
i think time machine could be so much better. i wish it was more customizable. meaning you could make it back up only once a day, every other day, ect. i wish you could pick what you want to back up and what you don't want to back up. if they could do that with TM i think it would make for an incredible tool
Click to expand...

Um, you can choose what you want backed up, maybe you've never used it. Also it's stupid to want to set TM to back up once a day or every other day. What's the point of that if you delete a file you can't recover it if TM backed up every other day.

On a different note, I like the TM UI, it's makes otherwise a boring idea fun to use. Nobody wants to waste time backing stuff up and nobody hardly used the Apple old back up solution. By making the space theme it created a reason for people to back up because the effect is cool.
Why does this forum always want to take away the fun experience of Mac OS X? We may as well be back on OS 9 or maybe even Windows if we want a "plain" and boring experience.
 
HLdan said:
Um, you can choose what you want backed up, maybe you've never used it. Also it's stupid to want to set TM to back up once a day or every other day. What's the point of that if you delete a file you can't recover it if TM backed up every other day.

On a different note, I like the TM UI, it's makes otherwise a boring idea fun to use. Nobody wants to waste time backing stuff up and nobody hardly used the Apple old back up solution. By making the space theme it created a reason for people to back up because the effect is cool.
Why does this forum always want to take away the fun experience of Mac OS X? We may as well be back on OS 9 or maybe even Windows if we want a "plain" and boring experience.
Click to expand...

Backup isn't supposed to be fun.

It's by its nature a boring process. The Time Machine interface totally gets in the way of the task and is generally OTT.
 
DaveF said:
I've specifically excluded the Podcasts folder for iTunes -- no need to store those. And I created a "scratch" folder that isn't backed up for when I'm doing video editing. I don't want multiple GB of temp video to be saved while being transcoded.
Click to expand...

ooh, thats a good idea - podcasts change a lot too so it'd bloat my backup

I've also excluded my parallels XP hard drive space as each time I use it, time machine would back the whole thing up. Wonder how I can back up my XP in the event my HDD goes down?
 
I already turned it off. Never used time machine before, so why start now.

What really bothered me is that you get a choice to set what folders to back up in the options. However when you add new (big) files to those folders, it starts backing those up automatically too. I accidentally ended up backing a 4 gig file and lost about a month of my regular backups, which are only 100 mb sized. That's when I though, screw you Time Machine, I'm going home…
 
Topher15 said:
I don't use Time Machine yet but will be soon and have a few questions...

- Time Machine mirrors you're computers hard drive, right. Well if you delete or edit a file on you're computer would the same not happen on you're Time Machine backup?

- Or does it save multiple versions of your files? I'm going to get a external hard drive (question thread) and was going to leave 320GB (the same as my iMac) for Time Machine and the rest of the space for manual storage. But if it saves multiple file backups would I need to leave more space?

- If you browse a previous version of a file or folder in Time Machine and click restore does it overwrite the version of the file or folder that it on the Mac itself? So say you edited a file, then made some new files, but then wanted to revert to the original file. Would TM just bring back that file and leave everything else in that folder as it is?

Thanks
Click to expand...
You should go to Macworld.com and read their recent TimeMachine article. Time Machine's purpose is to let you restore any file, because you deleted it or made a change to it that's undesired. So, no, deleting a file does not delete it from Time Machine -- that would defeat the whole purpose of it 🙂 Deleting a file, of course, means it won't be backed up in future Time Machines operations. But you can go "back in time" to restore it from when it existed. This restoration restores just the file(s) you select and replaces any current versions with the ones plucked from Time Machine. Of course, the ones replaced are also stored in Time Machine's history and could be restored themselves. See? 🙂


An example: Somehow (don't know how) several original photos in my iPhoto library vanished. The thumbnails were still there, but the original photos had disappeared. So I located the folder on my computer where the originals should have been, activated Time Machine, traveled back a few weeks until I saw them appear in the Time Machine folders, and restored them. They instantly reappeared in iPhoto as well, and all was good.
 
HLdan said:
On a different note, I like the TM UI, it's makes otherwise a boring idea fun to use. Nobody wants to waste time backing stuff up and nobody hardly used the Apple old back up solution. By making the space theme it created a reason for people to back up because the effect is cool.
Click to expand...
I agree completely.

I guess that Time Machine is envisioned to be used as I use it: invoked rarely, after a file is found to be unexpectedly corrupt or after an accidental deletion. This is not a workaday tool. It's something that you hope is never needed, but maybe is used every couple months.

To that end, the interface is highly efficient -- it's not a regular use tool with the efficiency of things like Expose. Rather, it's a tool with a lot of visual flair that does several powerful things:
* Indicates you're doing something different and special from normal OS X operations.

* Uses large buttons to quickly communicate the feature set (Forward & backwards in time, restore, cancel)

* Uses the progressing Finder windows to communicate the concept of going backward in time. This is the epitome of good Apple UI: graphical whiz-bang to make something sophisticated easy to grasp: progress through many, many backup states, the concept of "time travel" made visual. This reduces a complex software backup system to something understandable to anyone.

But I get the impression that some think of Time Machine as a regular tool; they want the restoration equivalent of Cmd-Z (undo) to be pressed without hesitation and without secondary graphical fluff. That's just not what the tool is.

In the long run, I think Time Machine needs to be made more efficient, rolled into Finder and made more of a mundane, worker-bee tool. But for now, this is so revolutionary it's OK to have this crazy, sexy -- and effective -- interface.
 
Vinnie_vw said:
I already turned it off. Never used time machine before, so why start now.
Click to expand...

Cool, and please don't ever come back on this forum and create a thread that you accidentally deleted a file in Leopard and need to recover it or you need to restore your HDD because of a failure, no one will give a damn.
 
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