There’s one feature that Apple, I’ve learned, really regrets scrapping from Leopard.
Originally, Time Machine had a lot of additional features which didn’t make the final cut. One of the features was to use the free disk space on the boot drive as shadow copy storage. This mimicked a feature from Vista that does the same thing (and Microsoft really doesn’t promote well at all). Alas, problems with multi-linked directories scrapped the feature.
But, this is not the feature I’m referring to. Originally, when installing Mac OS X, Leopard would offer to make an initial Time Machine backup of your Tiger drive. The benefits were three-fold: One, existing Mac owners would get an initial sales pitch for Time Machine. Two, users would be set up with Time Machine even before Leopard was installed. And, three, should anything go wrong, reverting to Tiger would have been painless.
And it’s that third feature that Apple still is regretting. Their support database continues to have to be updated with workarounds for partially-failed Leopard installs. The “Leopard Blue Screen Of Death” resulting from the APE Manager utility was one of the most notorious, as the tool had been integrated into some well-known drives (like, Logitech’s universal driver for all their accessories).
This brings me to why I wrote this post. Apple should not wait until the next generation of Mac OS X to add some of these features back. There’s nothing stopping Apple from adding a new update to the install disc and offering added functionality. Apple did this with Migration Assistant, and slipstreaming features like Time Machine during installation should be no different. It will save Apple money (in support costs), and improve the Mac experience overall.
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Everybody should stop pushing Apple to implement functionalities that do not work. If it does not work flawlessly, why would I want it in my OS ?
This comment must be put in by someone who is probably used to using Windows manchines where half backed functions are sold as the next best thing since cream cheese. I like my OS to work all the time with no problems, to do things right even when i’m not there to monitor them. When Apple takes something out or disables a functionality, I TRUST they removed it for some important reason. I don’t usually care what it is, i’m just glad my system does not start crashing on me because some “included because it was advertised and was supposed to be there but was not ready at shipping date was put in anyway because it was promised” function. That was my 2 cents.
Stephane, I certainly am not “pushing Apple to implement functionalities that do not work.”
What I noted was that Apple now wishes that they had fixed the bugs and gotten the implementation of the feature I noted to work properly.
Perhaps you should re-read the article to see the context.
Now, I will continue, as many others do, to push Apple to uphold commitments to users, and fix bugs in promised features… such as the previously announced support for AirPort Disk over Time Machine.
Bugs are not insurmountable walls. They simply require the proper time and use of the engineering team to fix the issue. Apple is a company with financial interests… and if nobody reminds Apple that they promised a feature here, sold someone on a product there, they’ll keep working on the most profit-generating features and leave everything else in the dust.
And then, Apple will be where Microsoft was a few years ago.
The best thing Apple has done was to not copy what MS did using your free space on your boot drive as backup. That space can get easily corrupted. Worse of all, if your drive fails and it has happened to colleagues, your out of luck. It’s a russian roulette safety feature. Relying on your boot drive for backup is just not smart. External drive is the right way. Either portable, NAS or your home external drive is the smart solution.
Well, there are three things going on here.
1) HFS+ Multi-linked directories would have prevented the “easily corrupted” issues. That feature was scrapped because of time to implement (remember, Time Capsule was buggy after Leopard was out).
NTFS also fixed the issues you reference in Vista. Shadow copy resources are quite robust against corruption in Vista, and as such, this was more of an early-XP era issue (and earlier, too).
2) Nobody is saying that you would rely on your boot drive as the only backup.
The best scenario I can present for this is for the mobile user. A mobile user doesn’t take their Time Capsule with them. While on the road, they might accidentally delete or make a change to a file, and want to restore it.
And that, is where shadow copies work best. Restoring single files while mobile, whereas your full “catastrophic” restore copy is at home on your external hard drive.
3) Apple may have gutted the shadow copy feature to prevent reliance on the internal drive as a sole Time Machine backup. However, I doubt it. That could have been avoided with a cautionary dialog box during setup… I revert back to point 1 for the real reason why it was scrapped.
Your article title, and a subsequent statement within your article, states that Apple regrets…something. What is your basis for that assumption?
As I said, Apple has had to expense massive amount of support costs to assist users with Leopard install problems.
Had they offered a Time Machine backup of the Tiger install prior to installing Leopard, it would be much easier to instruct users to revert to Tiger, fix the issue (usually via software update) and then re-run the Leopard upgrade.
And, as activity on their knowledge base shows, they are continuing to have to expense for new upgrade-related issues that require extensive Terminal work to solve. And, that can take over an hour on the phone to explain to someone that has never used Terminal before… let alone knows what a Terminal is.