Hi Jeff:
Yes, you can adjust the Time Machine backup Interval, see here:
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/08/terminal-tip-change-time-machine-backup-inter
val/
But my advice, for the vast majority of users, is "JUST DON'T DO IT"
If you are already a system administrator comfortable with administering the
backup strategy for a large system, then by all means have at it. But each
change you make has knock-on effects, and you could end up with a very slow
system, or no backup at all.
So my strong advice is "leaveitalone", and that's what I do
Most users who "lose a version" do so because they edit the document at
least a day after they created the original. Time Machine will protect
perfectly against that.
Time Machine electronically implements the conventional "Grandfather,
Father, Child" system of hierarchical incremental and full backups known
well by corporate system administrators.
Users who need greater protection than that are people who might have a
critical even happen at any time: police, air traffic controllers, military
forces, that kind of thing. For that kind of requirement there is a
different kind of machine altogether, known as a "Streaming Backup".
A streaming backup makes a copy to a different disk at each save of any
file. You get 100% protection. But you need to know what you are doing
when you set one up
Many large corporations have a streaming backup set up, although the
machinery is not prohibitively expensive so it's quite practical for people
such as film animators to set one up for a single workstation.
Cheers
Time Machine works fine for incremental backups, but in this scenario you may
conceivably end up saving a version that Time Machine does not backup, if you
miss the regular Time Machine backup timing.
The Time Machine preferences pane states that backups are done "hourly", so
there is the possibility that a "version" of the same file you save will be
ignored completely by Time Machine, especially if you use the very same file
name. At least that's how it seems to me.
Of course, if there is some way to adjust the frequency of Time Machine
backups, this may indeed become a viable option as John pointed out.
Since Word already contains document comparison features, I really think that
it would be best to just save different iterations using file names appended
with sequences like v1, v2 or perhaps -a, -b, -c or the likes. I do this all
the time, and more often than not I find that there is little reason to go
back to a previous version anyway.
This is kind of off the topic, but it seems that web technologies like
Wikipedia (or wikis in general) may be good solutions for versioning of short
to medium-length documents. I understand that there is a browser-based Office
available (of course, Google Docs is just such an application) - I wonder if
these services will offer versioning technology in wiki-style.
Jeff
--
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matters unless you intend to pay!
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
[email protected]