Time Machine is easily my favourite Leopard feature. For the first time I have a regular, automatic backup routine that runs in the background and never confronts me with annoying dialogue boxes whinging about how it was unable to back up my data (that’s you Retrospect, that is). Add to that the ease with which files and data within can be restored and the fact that individual files and folders can be accessed from the Finder and I can forgive it that clumsy ‘travelling through space’ graphical metaphor. Well almost.

There’s one piece missing from the Time Machine jigsaw, though: the ability to boot directly from a Time Machine volume when your boot drive fails. There is a workaround as this tip on MacOSX Hints details. And it involves nothing more complicated than performing a Restore from your original install disc onto a fresh volume and then using that as your Time Machine volume.

Great as that trick is though, it’s not as neat as the Time Machine features in the just-released update to SuperDuper, v2.5. According to developer, Shirt Pocket Software, SuperDuper 2.5 lets you store bootable Leopard back-ups on your Time Machine volume, making that volume bootable, and

“copy your Time Machine backups to other disks, so you can back them up or upgrade to a larger disk without losing your history.”

Lovely.

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