A front page link for this story on MacNN, which takes you to Electronista, which links to part 2 of the story back to MacNN?? Is this a sick joke??

Why does the most sophisticated OS in the world have this sleazy implementation of a back-up program—read: no advanced options. Ehatever happened to having 2 levels of user interaction - "novice" or easy, and "advanced." I don't know what truly professional user (see below) wants to turn their back-up procedure into basically an all-or-nothing thing.

The "big file" caveat: Golly gee, now who would be using MACs for large movie files, large graphic files, large audio files, and can't afford ANY kind if performance hit while doing them?

Doofuses.

The review pans the Time Machine interface for "professionals", but fails to mention the readily available alternative: Just skip the special effects and go to the backup drive and find the files you want.

TM mirrors your folder hierarchy, so if you need Users > Me > Document > stuff.txt, just get Users > Me > Document > stuff.txt in the latest backup folder.

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As for 12" ultra-slim portable, the market for those is negligible.

Well, there's three people on MacNN boards who want one. Three out of 20. That's something!

And who says that, because a market is neglible, it shouldn't be sought? Technically, Mikey Dell would be right back in 1998. The Mac market was neglibile. I guess you're lucky they decided not to just ditch the whole Mac out the window.

As for 12" ultra-slim portable, the market for those is negligible. Just look at the rest of the market (i.e. Windows world). How many 12" slim ones do you see? They sure are less than 5% of the market.

Yet if they were such a marginal market, why do so many vendors still sell them? Gee, could it be that they're still a profitable device?

There was a reason why 12" PowerBook was killed. Apple doesn't sell devices that don't make it money.

No, it was killed because Apple couldn't mentally handle the concept of having two 12" laptops and confusing its ever-stupid customer base.

Plus, the 12" powerbook was a weak sibling to the rest of the powerbook line, more of a tweaked iBook then a shrunken powerbook (no slot, none of the extra "cool" features, all of the price).

They weren't selling enough of those to make it worthwhile. I doubt anything has changed there. To all those (very vocal) people waiting for this, you have two hard choices: either go Windows, or accept slightly bigger, bulkier (and most likely cheaper) MacBook.

Is this the "Apple Way"? You'll like what we give you or s**** you? And a MacBook is a poor comparison to a 'pro' laptop, esp lacking in nice pro features and styling (nothing said "professional" for me then walking into a meeting with a shiny white iBook!).

This article is fine, but give me a break on the comments! Apple builds an easy to use backup solution that your GRANDMA can use, and you slam it?

Apple isn't stopping you from using whatever backup solution you want. Hopefully they'll continue to create "Backup" as well, which lets you do some of these things.

I have no problem with this article except for the fact that it boasts about WIndows replace feature which only gives users a false sense of security while taking up more space on their existing HD.

Time Machine is a GOOD thing and does what it intended to do. In fact, how many backup programs do you know of that will continue to backup when the backup drive is out of space? That is an example of obvious genius. If you setup dad's computer to backup using some "other" backup solution and it runs out of space it's not backing up.

And Testudo... your comments must be migrating. If Apple had done that, you'd be slamming them.

While the article contained some good information, one glaring error caught my eye.

The author stated that a local hard drive is needed and cites the lack of support for Airdisk as preventing network backups. What he failed to take into account is that Time Machine works just fine when using a volume shared from another Leopard-ized Mac.

Also, he praises Windows for not requiring separate storage for its recovery feature, but what happens when the hard drive dies? Answer: You lose your originals and backups.