Lately I’ve been talking a lot of talk about how great the Mac platform is. At work I go back and forth with a coworker on the merits of Linux and OS X. Of course he claims that Linux is all you need and I’m confident that the Mac is where it’s at. The reality is that OS X suffers its own set of issues which I have talked about in the past. No OS is perfect, just a matter of which one best fits your needs.

Anyway, through no fault of my own I managed to royally screw up my iTunes library to the point where some of the files were pointing to random objects in my backup drive. I have no idea how. At the same time my iPod Touch would simply not cooperate. Many files that I normally sync were listed as missing including over half of my largest play list which is still just a small subset of my entire collection.

So anyway, what’s my point right? My point is that I was able to save myself a ton of work simply because I turned on Time Machine.

Everybody says, “make sure you make a backup” but lets be serious, who actually does? This is one of the many reasons I claim OS X to be one of the best operating systems available for “normal” people. No other system that I am aware of provides such a simple, easy to use and surprisingly robust backup AND restore system. It is so easy you might actually forget it is there.

Restoring my iTunes library to normality was as easy as entering the Time Machine interface, going to the previous point in time, clicking the iTunes library files in my Music folder and clicking the restore button. Done deal. I plugged my iPod in and all of my files were copied back to it as if nothing had happened.