mac nerdiness

[egypturnash]

I'm not sure if I should be finding Apple's new Time Machine feature mildly cute, or completely drool-worthy.

Because I'm not sure if it's just a really snazzy interface to a normal backup tool, with nightly backups, or if it's a really snazzy interface to nightly backups and automatic file versioning. I haven't read the reports on WWDC too closely, but I've seen both suggested.

If it's automatically versioning files, that will kick so much ass. More than once I've wished for a versioning file-system when a program (usually Flash) saves garbage over what used to be a good file. Doing it manually is a habit I can't really seem to train myself into, and I'm not quite geeky enough to start using Subversion for my working directories.

Even if it's "just" an integrated backup solution, it'll still be a pretty nice feature, what with being able to dig into various Apple formats for individual pieces of data, and automatically recognizing external drives and offering to use 'em. If it's really clever it'll be able to version stuff on your machine, then dump old versions to the external drive when it's plugged in.

Comments

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

Can do even better than that with Subversion - if you set up the mod_dav_svn things in Apache, I believe you can map it as a folder in Finder and then every save becomes a commit. Obviously that makes it rather slower if it's not local (and, frankly, even if it is, because Finder's WebDAV and FTP support seem to attempt to do some weird things with XML), but you do get a versioned filesystem out of it. :)

I think the page is http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.webdav.autoversioning.html :)