Backing Up
With the release of Time Capsule, I think that it will definitely help families like mine (multiple Mac laptops) keep their computers backed up. I have dealt with customers that have bad hard drives with no recent backup at least 15 times in the past year.
It seems to me that a product like Time Capsule could prevent these problems with one exception, the iPhoto library.
In iLife ‘08 the storage for the iPhoto library was changed to a package from individual files. This means that if you add or even edit one picture the entire library must be backed up again. In my case that’s 32 GB of data.
It’s unfortunate that pictures are usually something that can’t be replaced easily, unlike emails, spreadsheets etc. I will be playing with Time Machine to see if there is a way around this. I have seen some comments on the web on procedures to change the storage format, but I have to wonder why this change was made in the first place.
If you control or right click on the iPhoto library and select Show Package contents it gives you the individual files, but Time Machine insists on backing up the entire package. If this persists I may be checking out the new Aperture 2.0 to see if it stores files differently.