A thought I had couple of weeks ago:
I think Apple’s new coming Mac OS X will help to sell more Mac mini…
Well, at least I know I’m going to buy a Mac mini as soon as Leopard is out. So I’m assuming I will not be the only one.
Why? Two words: Time Machine.
For those who haven’t already seen the demo of Time Machine, I strongly suggest to watch the Apple WWDC 2006 keynote video. Time Machine is presented around 31:00.
So… Why Time Machine is going to strongly urge me to buy a Mac mini?
Imagine the following setup: a powerbook (and you probably have a macbook (pro), lucky you!) with Time Machine setups to backup everything wirelessly to a Mac mini (probably plugged to the TV). Now if we want to even go further and fancier, we could even plug an external hard drive to the mac mini and setup the mac mini’s time machine to do its own backup to this external hard drive.
I think it’s a very good setup: I have my whole life on my laptop, but I don’t backup as often as I should, because it’s tedious, I have to plug my external hard drive and so on and so on. With this setup, everything is automatic, and wireless! How better could it be? And with the external hard drive plugged to the mac mini, you have another level of redundancy. Thus, it should be quite safe.
I just hope that Time machine is going to be smart enough to re-synch the backups whenever I come back home (let’s hope they already thought about that, or that they are hearing me 
).
Well, of course I don’t have to buy a mac mini for this setup, I could use a normal mini-PC or something else. But I think it’s a good idea to buy the mac mini. First I like it, it looks nice. And also I should be able to have 3 OS on it: Mac OS X, windows and linux. This should come handy in a lot of situations (porting softwares for example). On top of that, I have a powerbook G4, so having an intel-mac around would be nice…
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First, backups over a wireless connection will be slow and susceptible to the same data corruption problems you might expect from a modem connection.
Second, more parts = more possibility for failure. A Mac Mini + an external drive means you now have two components equally likely to fail and dork up your backup.
Third, companies like Seagate and LaCie make Storage Area Network drives so simple to use a small office could buy a SAN solution and be lots of money (and convenience ahead).
Time machines going to be awesome. But if you’re not backing up just because it’s too hard to plug in a cable…Time Machine’s probably not going to help you out.
Hi, thanks for the comment. You raised some interesting points.
Yes, the backups won’t be very fast, but since it will be incremental it shouldn’t be a problem. Well, at least for 99% of my everyday actions. I hope I will have an option to exclude large files (the videos I use during editing for example). I also hope they will have checksum (md5 for example) checks, that’s fairly standard in backup softwares.
On the other hand I don’t agree with your comment about more parts = more possibility of failure. You have indeed more possibility for failure, but less chances of having them all fail at the same time. If the external hard drive fails, I just replace it. If the mac mini fails, I have the backup from the external hard drive. And if my laptop fails, I have the backup from the mac mini (and indirectly from the external hard drive too).
Also I should probably clarify that I do backup my files. As a matter of fact my laptop’s drive failed recently, and my backups were only 2 days old, apart from the fact that I forgot to backup the mail directory…
That’s why I like the combination of the netword backup and the integrated sytem provided by Time Machine: it’s automatic, transparent and incremental. I think it’s particulary beneficial for a laptop. If I had a desktop, I could just setup regular backups, and it should be just fine. For the laptop I could probably achieve the same results with some scripts (detect if I am home, and backups on a regular basis), but I like the idea of having everything integrated in the OS, and having a sort of global CVS on my machine.
I hope it clarifies and makes sense
Can’t wait for Macworld to know more about Leopard…
Thanks for the comment,
ChoJin