Simple Backup and Network Storage From Apple
Without a whisper, Apple just solved a problem that has plagued computer users for years.
Backup is a killer app that just doesn't exist yet. Last year, when Steve Jobs revealed a few of the features of the upcoming Leopard update to OS X, Mac users were wowed with Time Machine.
Time Machine solves the backup problem elegantly. A simple user interface presents the file system arrayed through a z-axis representing time. I see my Documents folder right now, as it looked thirty minutes ago, and as it looked ninety days ago. This is amazingly useful for so many reasons.
Backup is more than restoring lost files, it's also about robust file versioning. Programmers rely on systems like subversion and CVS because they need to be able to roll back and forward through their changes to find bugs and fix them.
It should be no different with your Word document or my Photoshop file. Preserving snapshots in time is incredibly useful. Once we have it, we'll wonder how we ever lived without it. But this is still about backup, not just versioning. A versioned file system does no good if you drop your laptop.
At work, I'll tell Time Machine to backup my files to a server with nearly limitless data. It will run in the background and I'll never think about it. For home users this isn't a serious option.
Network storage is another killer app for exactly this reason. Setting up a web-based storage service like Amazon S3 or Strongspace are too geeky even for me to use on a regular basis. What we need is a way to go buy one of those huge hard drives they sell at Amazon or Best Buy, plug it into my network, and bam it works.
Without even a mention at Macworld, Apple has made this possible for Mac and Windows users. For year, we've been able to plug a printer into the Airport Express base station and have it available to all the computers on our home networks without installing anything.
The newest release of the Airport Extreme base station added a feature Apple is calling Instant Drive Sharing. Instead of plugging a printer into the USB port, simply plug in a hard drive. The simple-to-use utility allows you to set it up so whenever your computer joins the local network it connects to the remote drive. And if you want a drive and a printer, just plug in a USB switch and hook up multiple printers and drives.
And this is where Time Machine will come in when it's available. Apple hasn't said anything about this yet but it seems obvious to me that these products are designed to work together. Tracking a days worth of changes on the local file system is trivial. Pushing these changed to the remote hard drive when you get home should be easy.
This means that next time you drop your laptop and need to get a new one, you can bring it home, point it at your remote drive and demand your file history back.
If you want to get fancy, the utility also let's you set different user permissions for the drive so each user can have their own private network storage base.
As a professional Apple user it makes me happy to see them release such revolutionary but simple features with no fanfare because they have even better things to talk about.
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Who is this guy?
Sam,
I have to say that Apple only hit a ground-rule double on the AppleTV and Airport Extreme Announcements.
1) Gigabit ethernet is missing on both of these boxes!
2) Where is the Airtunes functionality for the Airport Extreme?
3) Can the AppleTV function as a wireless router or do I have to buy both an Airport Extreme and AppleTV if I want Airtunes and a full 802.11n network?
4) AppleTV is only 720p? No thanks, since anyone who spends $1000+ on an HDTV today should spring the extra bucks for a 1080p set.
5) Only one USB port? Can I hook up a second hard drive if I buy a USB hub? Can I back up from primary hard drive to a secondary (e.g. shared iTunes library and digital picture archive)? Will there be software solutions to backup two drives attached to either a Airport Extreme or AppleTV? Sure, you could buy an external drive with internal RAID 1, but a versioned backup scheme is what Time Machine is all about in the first place.
For me, these two boxes do not help me integrate a family network/media as well as a used Mac Mini can. Here's the solution I'm planning for my house:
1) His and her laptops running Leopard
2) Used Mac Mini ($250-300) running Leopard
3) 2x500gb SATA drives in OWC Mercury Elite-AL Quad Enclosures (eSATA, FW800 flexiblity)
Each of the 2 external hard drives are partitioned to 400gb and 100gb. In the first 400gb, I store a shared iTunes library, digital photography archive, etc. on one drive and have a nightly backup scheduled pointing to the other 400gb partition (Time Machine is likely unnecessary for this type of data).
Each of the two laptops have a Time Machine backup of their hard drives to the 100gb partition destinations served up by the Mac Mini.
The Mac Mini could also serve home theater duties nearly as elegantly and with much more flexibility than an AppleTV can. And if you have a gigabit ethernet-equipped Mac Mini, you can have speedy network access to the attached hard drives if you want. The Mac Mini is just too cheap and too flexible to overlook for NAS serving, Time Machine repository, wireless accessible iTunes server, etc.
Personally, I want to step into the wayback machine, and use a G4 Cube as my server. Fanless, and enough processing power to move files. Recently, I've been experimenting with using the Airport Express as a WDS node, providing network access to wireless-less machines via its built-in ethernet port. No luck yet, but I know its possible. That way, you can have 802.11g from the AX, when the Cube would otherwise have .11b. Its a bit of a waste on an AX, but they cost the same as original Airport cards on the secondary market.
It wouldn't have enough hp to do home theater, but its too difficult with DRM on media anyway. I've thrown in the towel on that fight.