With its “Time Machine” feature introduced with OS X “Leopard” in late 2007, Apple became a spearhead for giving its customers the right tools to help make sure their data is made both redundant and safe. The software doesn’t only keep backups of certain files or the entire OS; it backs up multiple versions of the same edited file to make sure that you can recover to an old version of the file even if you’ve overwritten it many times since.
For developers, this kind of functionality is imperative in making sure that no important changes to code are ever lost, and for similar reasons, Time Machine became a boon for Mac users, for obvious reasons. Since its launch, Time Machine has spawned many copycats, and for users of either Windows or Linux, it’s a very good feature to copycat if there ever was one.
Taking the idea of redundant backups even further, recent patents that Apple has filed seem to suggest that the company is planning on expanding a service like Time Machine to the cloud, where your valuable data will be kept online in addition to your PC, just as an added level of redundancy. I wrote a custom script in Linux to give me similar functionality, and it’s something I’d certainly not want to be without. Even after a PC crash, knowing your files are safely online gives an extra degree of assurance that your data is safe.
The patent even seems to expand on more than just data, suggesting that regular backups can be made of your applications as well, although it’s a bit hard to understand at this time exactly what would be included in these backups. Perhaps configuration files, for one, or entire applications for another. As an added bonus, this feature doesn’t look to be exclusive to Apple itself; rather Apple software developers will also be able to take advantage of the feature for whatever apps they create.
The idea of online backups sounds good, but I do wonder about the solutions that already exist that allow similar functionality. Acronis True Image, for example, also allows incremental backups of folders and files through its online service, so what will happen to that if Apple wins this patent should be interesting.
In programming and engineering, a similar concept is called version control. Software tracks the difference between file versions when saved and can recover previous versions. The Apple patent applications discuss something that seems like version control for applications that would run on an iPhone or iPad. The underlying concept isn’t new for Apple; the patent applications refer to and incorporate by reference applications that date back to August 2006.