When Time Machine was announced, I thought it was cool and dutifully turned it on when I upgraded to Leopard. I only thought of it as backup as in hard-drive-just-died backup, you know, *backup in case of a catastrophe*.
While I have yet to have to do a full restore from Time Machine because of a dead drive (knock wood), it did just save me from my own stupidity in a way I never imagined: While working on user interface stuff, I saved and closed an important Photoshop file *cropped* without undoing the crop, so that all that was left of my user interface was the one button graphic I happened to be exporting. I have no idea how long this would have taken me to restore under my old backup system (where by ‘restore under my old backup system’ I mean ‘redo the file from scratch’), but it took *seconds* with Time Machine–since Finder thumbnail previews appear in Time Machine, it was a snap to figure out which of the backups had the ‘last good’ version of the file.
And that was a revelation: Time Machine is really more like revision control than it is backup. Revision control for your *whole effing system*. With a sort of visual diff built in (via the Finder Quick Look stuff). That’s just flat-out extraordinary in a flying-cars, no-monetary-system, United Federation of Planets sort of way.
And for you music geeks, think about it: with a big enough backup drive, you have a copy of every iteration of your projects–not just the project file itself, but all the associated media and edits on same, too.
If you’re diligent about bouncing a mix every hour or so into your project folder in mp3, you can even use Quick Look to ‘preview’ the version in Time Machine (this is a good reason for audio software manufacturers to implement Quick Look plug-ins for their project files. I shudder to think of the work involved, but it would be *damned* useful.)