Computers fail; often.

And if they don’t fail, they get stolen.

And if they don’t get stolen, they get lost.

And even if you backup, how often does that backup work.

I use a Mac, and every so often I’m reminded why I use a Mac. It gets out of my way and just works, so I don’t worry about what computer I use, but it does happen to be a Mac.

I was reminded by this last weekend. The MacBook my wife uses has an internal hard-drive that simply died. It simply died. Booting from the System disk yielded the error that the hard drive was unrepairable.

No sweat was expended. I could have bought a new internal hard drive and installed it, or do what I chose to do. Replace the entire machine. (It was nearly 4 years old and had put in a good innings.)

Friday night, I ventured down to Best Buy, walked in and out in a few minutes and 25 minutes later had the new MacBook Pro (13″, a VERY nice machine) restoring from the Time Machine backup that was last updated about 30 minutes before the old computer died.

It restored in about 4 hours to exactly has she left it. The mess of icons scattered all over the desktop included.

While the machine was on my desk, I installed Snow Leopard. That was another 35 minutes. (Which itself is another functional upgrade.)

I took the machine upstairs and returned it, exactly as she had last left her old machine not a few elapsed hours earlier.

Time Machine truly does work.

Whether it is a single file, an entire hard drive or the way your system was two weeks ago, Time Machine simply works.

Knowing that you always get back to exactly where you were, be it because someone stole your laptop or you were just stupid is very powerful. You can get back to doing the work that you do and not worry about HOW you do it.

It Just Works!