I tried it once and it worked flawlessly. I used it to duplicate a Mac to another.

I use it for both work and at home, and in both cases to an external HD. I don't have TM saving over our network currently, but I am going to set that up for my other designers once we add some bigger HDs to our server. I have heard it works well over networks, so you should be good. I would suggest that you either have separate partitions or separate drives for the backups, since TM will eventually fill up your disk(s). It won't overwrite other files if you happened to have them saved on the same drive/partition (TM gets rid of the oldest files it has in its backups only), but once it fills you obviously can't save to it anymore.

Will you be using the xserve for anything else? There are other alternatives if you're mostly looking for backup solutions. You could instead get a Mac Pro with all them drive bays and fill them with 1TB drives. Also, Scott Kelby talks about how he backs up, but the part to look at is about the Drobo. Whatever you end up doing, post about it and tell us how it went.:)

The only complaint that I have, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that time machine can't back up an air disk. It works seamlessly as it backs up automatically and has no problem restoring the whole system, or just what what you are looking at (even while your in apps like mail, or address book).

It does start deleting old backups when the disk is full, but it might not be as you think. It saves more regular backups the closer you get to todays date, and less regular backups the farther back you get in time.

To restore your system you just do it from the installation disk. If there are more than one Time Machine backups, it will give you the option of which one to choose from. It's clean and couldn't be easier.

But since my iTunes library is on an 500 GB external hard drive connected to my airport express, Time Machine won't back it up. So I use Synk Standard to do it.

Very Respectfully,
Anthony

Oh,
I know you can swap HDs to rotate backups, but I'm not sure how it would work with tape backups. Good luck though, and let me know what you find.

Very Respectfully,
Anthony

The xserve will be sweet to have. Check out the Apple support pages about TM procedures. Here's an article that covers restoring files and folders, and here's one covering restoring a whole system.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this: When TM fills up your drive, it starts deleting the oldest versions of backed-up files. It doesn't delete the oldest backup set straight outright, because what if your oldest files ended up being system files? Once full, TM starts removing the oldest versions of files, but if there's only one version of a file then it's not going anywhere. I'm not sure if that is the case for files other than system ones, but I would think so. It all has something to do with Unix hardlinks, which I don't exactly understand. It's important to remember that TM is for backing up and not for archiving.

I don't think time machine will save to a tape device. You could theoretically backup your TM backup to the tape drive using some other software but that would be kinda ridiculous. To restore from that, you would have to restore the TM backup to some drive other than the boot drive, then select that TM backup set to restore from. The TM backups could be many times larger than a straight clone, it would be better to just archive at set intervals to the tape drive or other media directly.

... but it's not for me.

I don't trust a backup that I can't look at. Maybe it's having been burned by bad backups in the past. But I put my money on SuperDuper making cloned copies of my work folders (on work Mac) and my entire computer (on home Mac). If anything happens to the startup drive, I can head to another Mac at work with my external drive of all happily backed up material; or at work, just fire up the Mac from the full, bootable backup on my external.

I can browse these, pull files from them as necessary if I delete anything, etc. Sure, it's all a day old. But based on my experience and thorough saving, the only issue happens when I save over a file, or trash something. I catch it right then, and go to the backup to retrieve yesterday's file. Not much time lost.

Time Machine? Seems good in theory, and looks damn fine. But I dunno if I'd bet my lifeblood on it.

I've used Time Machine successfully.

My MBP hard-drive was wiped after an Apple repair. I took it home, booted up the fresh install, selected the Time Machine option, and in a couple of hours I was back to my old system. Exactly. Documents, applications, library files, preferences. All there.

If I remember correctly, Time Machine uses hard links as a means of showing multiple instances of a file (for multiple time backups) while there's only one instance in data. Although the drive isn't bootable, I think that's a small price to pay for having the backup history of a working file. (Or state of your system for that matter.) I think that Time Machine's a great solution for 98% computer users who would normally not back up their data. It has a friendly, intuitive UI that's grounded in a robust backup system. Apple hit their mark again.

What's needed now is a small utility that interacts with a Time Machine drive to create a bootable image. Select the date and rebuild your system to another machine.

I think it's completely ridiculous to not back up one's data, especially with a portable machine. If you're not even backing up your work data, then you're hardly a professional.