On Sunday 12 June 2011 06:09:41 Linda Walsh wrote:
Anders Johansson wrote:
Out of interest (because I have no experience with Mac), could you explain what Time Machine does that is different from a normal backup program - not counting the 3D GUI for restoring backups, which is pretty nice looking but not necessary for functionality
---- Never used time machine, but your comment about a GUI not being necessary for restoring files is akin to saying there's no need for user's to have a 'desktop' on computers -- they can just use a console.
Any idiot knows that's complete crap.
Well, I was referring to the 3D GUI, not GUI in general. I have seen demos of Time Machine, and they have windows flying through space like a game
The interface on something is what can make or break something all other things being equal. If you have a cumbersome awkward or difficult to use interface, it won't get used or be usable.
If you have one that makes it a breeze, it opens up **new paradigms** in usage.
Can you imagine doing video processing if we still had an interface of punched cards?
Sure, a Video screen is nice, but punched cards would let you do it all.
I didn't actually mean there shouldn't be a GUI. If you had read my second email, I said we have the functionality, so now all that remains is that someone writes a neat GUI for it. I completely agree that a good GUI is important, but the core functionality must come first. For example, you can't start a GUI from cron, and most backup programs aren't designed to be run manually. The GUI usually comes in when you want to restore things If we already have the functionality, a GUI can (should) be put on top of it to make it easier to use, but if we don't even have the functionality we'd need to write the whole thing from scratch All I meant was that if we have the core functionality of Time Machine, then we're not that far away from having the whole thing.
As for "3D" -- I wasn't aware the MAC supported NVIDIA's 3-D goggles nor that it's time-machine required them. Though an appearance of 3D for browsing files (a file hierarchy is usually displayed as some type of tree -- a 2D diagram), then having the appearance of 3 dimensions could be useful for browsing forward or backward in time.
It's not 3D like Avatar, it's 3D like a first person shooter. Windows flying through space
'star' (a tar like prog) has good backup functionality (supports ACLS's XATTRS, all the 'tar' versions, compression, but it's command line only. xfsdump could be alot better if it kept full file inventories ... but backup progs that are "plentiful", that support modern file system semantics? Not my experience.
Command line backup utilities are indeed plentiful. rsync, tar (I have had issues with star, it doesn't always back up everything, there are bugs in it), but I completely agree that we need a nice GUI for restoring, for selecting which files to restore. You read my email as a rant against GUIs, but that is not what I intended. I was just taking stock of what we had, not what we needed Anders -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org