Well, as I am writing this post I am in the process of doing  Time Machine restore. When I originally bought my Macbook Pro, I setup time machine purely because I had an extra 500GB external hard drive laying round, and I wanted to be able to brag to people about how cool time machine looks when you use it. Well, I have had my Macbook Pro for over 4 months now, and today is the 3rd time Time Machine has saved my ass!

I was at work earlier today running software updates on OS X when my machine asked me if i wanted to restart after it installed an update, and with out thinking, I clicked OK. When my machine came back up it occurred to me that I had my Windows XP Pro VMware Fusion partition running, and had not properly suspended it or shut it down. I quickly opened up VMware Fusion to see if it was still OK. Well it wasn’t, I found that it was frozen on the loading screen when trying to load up the Windows XP Pro install from where it left off. So yea, at this point I am worried.

I use Windows XP Pro on VMware Fusion as my primary work computer so when this would not load, I freaked. I had a 50GB partition of my hard drive filled with important work stuff and it would not load.

With in a few minutes I realized I had a Time Machine backup of that data on my home external backup drive. I opened up Time Machine, browsed to the Virtual Machines folder and clicked restore from my update last night. What a relief!!

Time Machine is probably the most unused program that comes on a Mac, but I would recommend you run it in the background all the time. When you happen to need it, it is great! Now if I could just get 50GB of data to restore in less than 1 hour I might actually get some work done today!