Thursday, July 5, 2007

Time Vault, The Linux Version of Time Machine

As anyone who pays attention to anything related to mac, you may probably know of the new feature in Leopard called Time Machine. Time Machine just in case you don't know or just don't get what it does is a nice back up/recovery system for your files. So how does Time Machine work, well you have it connect to an internet storage host or your external hard drive and it syncs up and just starts remembering....basically its like a brain for your computer and remembers what folders once had inside. With this knowledge you can go back in time on your computer if you knew you had a file in a certain folder but now don't see it there, you can travel back in time and go back to when that file was in that folder. If non of my explanation on how mac's time machine works then I guess read what they have to say about it because they can probably explain their own product much better then I can. So obviously after reading my explanation or mac's explanation your like, "this is pretty super cool", or your thinking, "yea this is cool but I knew about this for ages so why you waisting your time and writing about it now?" So why am I writing about this, well I think its kind of obvious There is something similar out for Linux users!!!! Well I wouldn't get to excited yet, read on or go try it out yourself.

So I was super excited about this when I first read about it at this blog post, but was it all that I dreamed it would be? Well not exactly or maybe I just don't understand it..... So i downloaded the package from here, and installed it very easily. After logging out and then back in like it said, I had it running ad tried to configure it. Not gonna lie I found the preferences pretty hard to understand.Once I was some what sure I had it configure to what I think were my likings, I tried to test it. Let me say this first before I go into my review on how it works, it looks nothing like mac's Time Machine it inst super snazzy looking and beautiful, but I was willing to not have that bother me and use it if it worked as advertised. So the first thing I did was go into my home directory and move a directory out of there, and see what this so called Time Vault did.Well it actually didn't do anything to my disappointment....so I waited.......and waited....then gave up and decided to do other things.....after a while of ambiguously surfing the internet something happened! In the top right hand corner where my notification area is the icon that represented Time Vault notified me something change din my file system. So now I got excited, and rused to my home folder and clicked the Time Vault Icon and it was getting so exciting, but then wait I remember I already put the file I moved back into my home folder....I thought it didn't work so I just put it back but now Time Vault says it was moved but hasn't said it was moved back..... SO then I started to move things like crazy back and forth back and forth in my frustration, and once I tried to call something back with Time Vault but it didn't work, but maybe because it was lagged to like 5 or 6 moves ago. So basically Time Vault didn't really work for me but maybe it because I was confused on how it works or how to set it up, but don't let my review deture you give it a try and leave a comment if you figured out something I didn't. As for me I give up on Time Vault for now.