There’s an informative read on Arstechnic by John Siracusa concerning Apples’ Leopard Time Machine back-up application and the future of the Apple HFS+ file system.
So, to sum up, Time Machine is an automated backup system with an inspired lack of user-visible moving parts, but a fair to middling underlying implementation. It’s not based on snapshots. It doesn’t use ZFS. It doesn’t use a new Apple file system. It’s not a big truck. As for the future of file systems in Mac OS X, I continue to hold out hope that something more modern will replace HFS+. It doesn’t have to have every buzzword feature under the sun, nor does it even need to have all the ones I described earlier. But a few would be nice. And yes, snapshots are high on that list.
John goes into detail describing the advantages and disadvantages of Apples HFS+ file system and gives good argument for why it needs to be updated. He states that Suns’ ZFS would be an acceptable alternative but that he doesn’t think that will be the case.
He also had an interesting perspective of Apple’s Time Machine demo at WWDC 2006.
When I saw the demo of Time Machine, all I could think of is what kind of interface the same set of basic requirements would have produced if created by Microsoft instead of Apple. I pictured some sort of File Recovery Wizard, replete with date-picker widgets and multiple “Browse…” buttons to select target and destination folders. The five-step process would end by clicking a button named “Finish.” There may or may not be an animated cartoon dog.
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