Time Machine is one of the greatest innovations since the hard disk. It's a program imbedded in Leopard (Apple's latest operating system) for archiving and backup. Simply plug in an external hard disk and designate it as your Time Machine backup disk - the rest is history! Time Machine automatically syncs to your computer every hour or every time the external disk is plugged in. It doesn't just back up system files either. It backs up every folder, file, and application on your computer. If you accidently delete a file, simply open Time Machine, find the last date that the file existed, select the file, and click restore. Boom! Your file is back. It's the simplest, most thorough, safest, and easiest way to backup your computer.

Now, contrary to folklore, Macs do occasionally crash. Though they do crash, it is far less frequently than PCs. Ironically, though the Mac crashes less, it seems to have a far better backup system than any PC I've ever seen.

The day before the meetings started I got an update for my Mac. Unfortunately, my Mac, being a computer, crashed upon installation and refused to boot.

"Oh dear... My presentation slides were all on that computer. If I'd have known this would happen I'd never have started that update! I wish I could go back and do it over again..."

I know, this sounds really weird to you PC users. The extent of my thoughts when I was a PC user were, "not again..."

I simply plugged in Time Machine and with a few clicks of the mouse I was on the way to restoring my computer to its exact state 3 days earlier. It all worked seamlessly - almost...

The only hitch was that Time Machine doesn't archive e-mail. I had opted to keep all incoming mail in my gmail inbox instead of archiving it after downloading. This meant that every e-mail I'd received since I got my Mac was still in my gmail inbox. Since Time Machine didn't archive my mail, I had to re-sync my inbox with my mail client. So, after setting up Apple Mail to retrieve mail from my gmail account, I had a lot of unread messages - a lot. Checking your e-mail is like Christmas morning - if there's nothing under the tree, it really disappointing. But imagine coming downstairs Christmas morning to find 4705 presents under the tree - wouldn't you feel special? I sure did!