Time Machine saves the day

Question

i had to post this. Somehow all my contacts lost their phone numbers. Of course this was all synced out to MobileMe and my iTouch. No numbers anywhere. These are numbers i have had for 20 years. Not recoverable. Not sure what did it but I thought I would see if Time Machine works specifically with Addrress Book.
I open address book and open Time Machine. There are al the address book back ups. I scroll back to one that has phone numbers ad hit restore all. Several seconds latr all mu numbers are back. In several more seconds the numbers are back one my iTouch.
That is a tribute to Time Machine if I ever saw one.
Great stuff.
Greg

Answer 1

Trevor.Dennis wrote:
So you don't have anything like Shadow Protect running in the background?
Video editing software only needs to save the steps taken to achieve the edit, and references the actual video files from the hard drive.  So the saved files are only tiny, and it takes very little drive space to auto save to incrementing file names.  Obviously, Photoshop files can be huge by comparison, so the only way to save with a different file name is to do it manually.
I think most regular posters to this forum make a point of updating the file name of a large project every hour or so, and as a direct response to reading so many horror stories like your own.  The worst story I remember was from a poster whose computer had crashed half way through saving a large PSD file.  After several response, questions and answers, it turned out he was using a laptop with a failing battery.  He told us that he could see the battery was getting low, but left it and left it before finally hitting Ctrl s and running off to find the laptop's power lead. When he got back the laptop had run out of power and shut down, and his PSD file was lost forever.  He may have been a prime candidate to a computing Darwin Award, but his stupidity still did the rest of us a service so we could learn from his mistake.
Ouch. 
My digital audio workstation works on the same principle; it creates a backup save just in case things go wrong (which--knock on wood--hasn't happened to me) and only references audio/MIDI files that are related to the project.
My advice is to always, always back up sensitive documents. There are lots of ways of doing this, from manually to automatically. (e.g., A lot of higher-end routers let you connect external storage via USB so you can run backup software that detects any changes to a monitored folder over a network and then backs up any changed/updated documents to the connected storage. I prefer to do it myself manually, though.)