Back in February I started using Time Machine, the backup system from Apple. And I can't be happier. Backups run smoothly and fast.

Before using Time Machine, I tried a couple of times to do backups with cool 3rd party applications like Carbon Copy Cloner. This works great to do a full backup, but it doesn't handle incremental backups (not that I know).

I have a 300 GB Maxtor external hard drive I bought a couple of years ago. Before I used it for media storage, like stuff recorded from TV, etc. But I decided I wasn't using it very much, since I have enough space for all that on my desktop. Back in December I found MacOS X can't write on a NTFS drive (not without doing anything special - we can't talk about that later) so I decided to split my hdd in two partitions, one FAT and one Mac.

Then, when I was getting ready to use Time Machine, I though it would be cool to use the drive for baking up both laptops, Kelly's and mine. So I splitted it again in two Mac partitions, one for each.

It wasn't until my first backup that I discovered the cool structure Apple uses for the TimeMachine backups:

• All the data is place on a folder called Backups.backupdb.
• Then, inside it, one folder is created for every computer backed up on that disk, using each computer name.
• Finally, on folder is created for every backup, with date and time stamped on the folder name. A symbolic link points to the current or latest backup.

So yes, I realized I didn't need a partition to backup each laptop. I could back them up on the same partition with no problem. So I erased the external hard drive again, creating this time only one partition for both of us.

Since then I have done backups every now and then. Maybe once or twice a week. And it is very cool, as I said, to watch how simple the process is. I love TimeMachine :)