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Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today’s episode let’s take a closer look at Time Machine and how it can help you recover emails, photos, and contacts.
So, at its heart, Time Machine is like any other back-up solution. It will back up your machine on a regular schedule, and will help you find files whether they are a few hours old or a few months old. Now it has got a really cool interface that allows you to go in and easily find files in the finder by moving around both in time and space, the space being the Finder, and time being your previous back-ups. But, did you know you can do the same thing with iPhoto, Mail, and Address Book? So, here we are in the Finder and we can see that we are going to go activate Time Machine, and it will use that Finder window we had open and then show us that Finder window back in time. And we can now go back in time and look at our previous version of that Finder window, find files we want, select them, restore them, or just preview them right there. Okay, but now here we are inside of Mail. Now, if we activate Time Machine while Mail is running, we’ll get the same kind of functionality but check this out, we actually get the Mail window going back through time. We can go back in time and look at what our inbox or any of the mailboxes look like hours or months ago. We can also even select the mail messages and see the preview below just like when you’re using Mail in your current mailbox. You can also select a message of course and select restore and it will restore it to a new Time Machine folder in Mail, or it might just be enough just to actually look at the mail back in time and get the information you want from it. Now here’s iPhoto. Now, if we have some missing photos in iPhoto but we knew we had them in the past, we can run Time Machine with iPhoto running, and there we get the same thing. We get iPhoto going back through time. We can go to a previous version of our iPhoto library, look at photos there, and select them, and press the restore button to get them back into our current library as well. So last but not least we have Address Book. Run Address Book, then activate Time Machine, and now we can go back and look at previous versions of our Address Book to find contacts that may not exist in our current version of the Address Book. We can simply get the information from there or select them and hit the restore button to add them back to our current Address Book. So this is really where time machine sets itself apart from any other backup solution. I mean photos and mail are two of the most critical things you may have on your Mac and knowing that your back-up solution works specifically with those applications is a great feeling. I mean, can you imagine trying to recover an old email using a back-up solution that just saves the entire mailbox?
We can hope that in the future Apple also includes other things like perhaps iTunes and iCal in Time Machine. But until then, this is good enough reason to use Time Machine over any other back-up solution. So if you’re not using Time Machine, this is the best reason ever to start right now. ‘Till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.