leopard biggest mistake
Friday, November 2nd, 2007For one who didn’t know what the hell Leopard is, I would like to give some introduction. Leopard is the world greatest desktop operating system, thats all. It developed by a company that also create the world greatest phone and media player.
I said thats all. I won’t explain more about Leopard features as you can easily follow my previous link or doing a Google search. What I really want to say is about the biggest silly mistake Leopard had that unfortunately located in it’s biggest killer feature. Yes, Time Machine.
With Time Machine, backing up your entire system is simply plugging external hard drive. No need regular task that you must do manually, no pain. Plug and forget. Restoring the backup is even more fun. You can search and browse the backup database. You’ll see a stacked Finder windows, each window represent each backup snapshot. You can go back and forward across the stack time, find which file you want to restore, and then… No you don’t have to restore it, you can simply preview it!
Seems perfect. But not internally. Long story short, Time Machine does NOT store the incremental changes of an altered file but the each version of the files instead. It means a small changes in a big file will easily fill up your backup drive. Even changes in small file can also waste space if happen frequently.
Thats not what we expect. I, and many programmers here, expect something more like Subversion which we used to employ for tracking changes, reviewing, and backing up our work. We expect filesystem that behaves like a version control and great front end for that. Apple only did the second part.
I think I’m not exaggerating if I say that Leopard biggest mistake is by not using ZFS as the default filesystem but only supporting it as read only filesystem. Why Apple, why…?
