TR Forums

boof, Time Machine needs to back up to an AFP server, so a G4 tower running Tiger or Leopard is preferred. I know linux distros have AFP occasionally built-in or as an installable module, but I'd have to learn all that from scratch and I just can't be bothered. My time is worth money, and the money required to secure a cheap tower + an old version of OS X (Tiger) is way easier and the time saved pays for itself in either leisure or real dollars.

Ah, fair enough.

(I don't really care about Time Machine, so...)

you would if you wanted automated backups of critical data on the Mac. If you're not using your Mac as a production machine, but simply as a web surf box or something similar where you can get automated uploads of your info to Mobile Me or bookmark sync services like Foxmarks, it's less important.

edit: not to be so dismissive, some people prefer to use a full drive backup software like Carbon Copy Cloner, it's just way more manual than Time Machine.

See, I don't have all that much on the Mac, and stuff changes infrequently enough that automated backups are completely unnecessary.

right, yours is a status symbol and mine is an actual machine used to do stuff.

Bling bling, sir, bling, bling.

Actually, no, mine sits in the corner, only used for iPhoto, really. It's the ThinkPad I use every day, including out in the world, because I can't stand a 1.2GHz G4 any more.

(Nor can I stand the crappy keyboard any more, or the fact that it occasionally likes to randomly power down, or the fact that the battery is sucktastic.)

Isn't that the one I suggested duct taping an external hard drive to the lid? Not much bling in that sort of laptop.

And backing up the iPhoto library is easy anyway.

Exactly.

If I had OS X on this ThinkPad, I might be tempted to use Time Machine, but...

It looks like my next machine (to replace the ThinkPad actually) will be a Fujitsu P1630, after they come down in price some...