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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.
Who is this guy?
