I feel like a broken record (you do remember records, right?) when I keep preaching the backup religion, yet when Apple said that roughly 26% of my fellow Mac users backup anything at all, I had to feel extremely disappointed.

The news that only a fraction of that number routinely used backup software was even more frustrating. Consider how many backup applications are available, ranging from Apple’s own Backup, which comes with your .Mac membership, to my favorite, SuperDuper!

Nor is it a matter of ease of use. Most of these applications have simple setup assistants or configuration panes that take the drudgery out of the process. You don’t even have to be around if you just create a scheduled backup, and make sure your Mac and your backup medium are running at the appointed time. Barring a power outage, you’re good to go.

Now one of my long-time acquaintances, a graphic artist, keeps pestering me to set up a backup solution for him. He even pays me to accomplish the task from time to time, and, when I do establish a proper backup program for him, I test it and make sure it’s functional, then deploy it on his network. Alas, a few weeks later, something is broken on his end, and he never gets around to fixing the problem or asking me for assistance.

Then there’s that client who only phones me when he’s panic-stricken about a problem with his Mac systems. Usually it’s the lost data, because he keeps ignoring my advice about backups.

To these people and millions of others, I am grateful that Apple came up with Time Machine. Mind you, I’m not going to blow any nondisclosure agreements and tell you anything but what you’ve read in Apple’s own online descriptions about Leopard’s capabilities. But I’m extremely optimistic that they have found the magic bullet to encourage all of you to perform regular backups.

Best of all, Time Machine will allow you to return to a specific state with a file, folder or even your entire drive. So if an update goes badly, or you trash a file by mistake, you can get it back, just like that!

Of course, you do need some sort of backup medium to store the backup sets created by Time Machine. It doesn’t just happen, nor will those files be stored on your startup drive or partition. Here’s where some uninformed critics are having at Apple for specifying that “Time Machine requires an additional hard drive (sold separately).”

In the narrow-minded view of some, that’s a bad thing, to have a second storage device to protect yourself against losing your data. Fortunately, I do not live in that alternate universe where the laws of common sense apparently do not apply, so I’ll just make a few points.

First of all, external drives are pretty cheap these days. You can get FireWire and USB devices (and some that include both ports) for less than $100 with sufficient storage space to accommodate the needs of millions of Mac users. Add another $100 or $200 to your budget, and you’ll match even the larger drives provided with today’s high-end Macs.

If you have a PowerMac or Mac Pro, you can even install one or more internal drives, if that’s what you prefer, and save a fair amount of money, since you don’t have to pay for the external cases and various and sundry interface components.

All right, I realize backups may be less convenient for a notebook computer, since you don’t want to have to carry around too much stuff for your various travels. In my case, I actually have a spare 120GB notebook drive in a tiny bus-powered enclosure that’s stored in my MacBook Pro’s carrying case. So, you see, I have no excuses to offer. The thing is tiny enough and light enough not to disturb my routine.

Sure, I suppose you can say that Apple is in league with those struggling hard drive companies to sell more product. Indeed, you’ll find some extra drives at Apple’s own retail shops and its online store, and you can bet they make a decent profit from every unit sold.

You might also suggest that Apple wants to put the companies who make backup software out of business. But nothing about Time Machine prevents them from building in new features that might match or eclipse what Apple can do in Leopard.

Besides, as much as I like some of those backup applications, they are, in the scheme of things, abject failures. You see, Apple wouldn’t need to create Time Machine if large numbers of Mac users were using the third-party products. But with market shares of just a few percent of the Mac user base, it wasn’t just the quest for fancy eye-candy to exploit Leopard’s Core Animation feature that brought Time Machine into being. Apple would not have brought those statistics to light if there wasn’t a serious problem that needed a convenient, nearly-seamless solution.

Now I can’t say that Time Machine is the be all and end all of backup software. But if it is as easy to use as Apple’s public demonstrations and online presentations claim, it may spark a much-needed revolution.

So tell me, dear reader, do you have a backup solution that you use regularly to protect your data? And, if not, are you going to try Time Machine — or even upgrade to Leopard? This inquiring mind wants to know.

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When you examine Apple’s financials in even a cursory fashion, you have to consider that, not so long ago, it took almost a year for them to earn $6.22 billion of revenue. Now Apple can do this in a single quarter, and nobody can guess just where this might end up in the next few years.

The basic numbers released Monday afternoon were extremely encouraging, and way more than Apple’s fiscal fourth-quarter guidance and, as usual, ahead of Wall Street estimates.

In all, some 2,164,000 Macs were sold, of which 1,347,000 were laptops, and 817,000 desktops. The new iMac line, according to Apple, is getting great reception, and the company’s inventories are down to three weeks, which is, in the scheme of things. quite low. In all, Mac sales were up 34 percent over the same period last year.

In the iPod world, 10.2 million units were sold, an increase of 17 percent over 2006. Meantime, how many of you actually remember that there’s a new Zune line coming out next month? No raised hands! I thought so.

As far as the iPhone is concerned, total sales were 1,119,000, which greatly exceeds Apple’s original estimate of a million units by the end of the quarter, and you can bet the $200 price cut really sped sales to higher levels. And, lest we forget, that figure excludes the 270,000 during sold during the iPhone’s first weekend, which occurred in the previous quarter.

For this quarter, Apple is expecting $9.2 billion, which should reflect the holiday season upturn for the iPod and the iPhone. Mac sales, though, aren’t expected to change much, since the back-to-school season is where they truly excel.

When it comes to hard-core financials, Apple’s fourth quarter earnings were, as I said before, $6.22 billion, with profits totaling $904 million. Indeed, total revenue for the entire year reached a record $24 billion, with $3.5 billion net income.

Apple’s money stash amounted to $15.38 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. This is an increase of $1.68 billion over the previous quarter and you have to wonder what Apple intends to do with all that money, or are they still hedging against a rainy day some time in the future?

Clearly Wall Street loved the news, as Apple’s share price went up nearly five percent in after-hours trading. If you want the rest of the figures, go ahead and check Apple’s site for the specific numbers.

You have to wonder if Apple can’t just rest on its laurels, but the news continues to be coming up roses. As of now, there are reports that Mac OS X Leopard preorders remain at or at the top of the sales charts at Amazon and may, in fact, be selling twice as fast as Tiger, which came out in the spring of 2005.

Of course, there are millions of additional Mac users now, so that surely helped. At the same time, compared to the totally tepid reaction to Windows Vista, the anticipation for Leopard may be off the charts. Clearly lots of Mac users — and perhaps some potential Windows switchers — are going to be watching Leopard’s early days carefully. If it proves to be a robust operating system, free of serious bugs, the sales rate may even go higher.

Then again, I suspect a lot of you have new Macs on your shopping lists anyway, and you can be certain a lot of the future sales of Leopard will result from copies preloaded on new computers.

As to the potential for Windows switchers, Apple stills claims that over 50% of the people buying Macs at their own 197 retail outlets are new to the platform. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if financial analysts care to ask the question of just how Apple arrives at those statistics. I do know a number of people who have purchased new Macs from Apple, but haven’t been asked the key question of what kind of computer they were upgrading from.

So is this just another case of taking a statistical sample, in the fashion of one of those polling companies? I can’t say that I know anything about the process, except that Apple isn’t giving us the requisite sampling range.

As to the rest of the analyst conference, Apple typically didn’t provide much meaningful information. Most of the comments amounted to talking points that are designed to enhance their corporate image. Where probing questions were asked, Apple generally didn’t do much but amplify a few facts and figures, and seldom ventured beyond that point.

What this means on the long haul, however, is that Apple’s executives are happy, their stockholders are happy and, for now at least, Wall Street remains pleased.

You can also bet that the usual offenders will be carefully dissecting Apple’s numbers to see if they can unearth some bad news in the sea of favorable developments. When they find that information, they will shout it to the skies. One example, perhaps, is the Japanese market, where Apple doesn’t seem to be growing quite as fast as the rest of the world.

I can just see the headlines now, “Apple drags in Japan.” They admit it’s a “tough market,” though, and they’re working hard to break through. But that’s about it.

The rest of Apple’s financial picture is supremely robust. Let’s just leave at that.

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As Leopard approaches, you have to wonder whether even 300-plus new features and enhancements will be sufficient to sway the skeptics about its potential. You see, as far as software numbering schemes go, incrementing a single tenth of a point usually signifies a pretty insignificant update.

I mean, you can name most any application’s transition from, say 7.0 to 7.1, and the differences will be awfully minor. It may be a little more involved than a few bug fixes, but still nothing worth charging a full upgrade price.

In the 1990s, even Apple had larger increments in its numbering schemes. Take Mac OS 8.0 and 8.5. Not substantial in any respect. However, moving from System 7 to 8 gave Steve Jobs leverage to seriously inflate charges to those Mac OS clone companies, with the ultimate goal of getting rid of them. Otherwise, maybe 8.0 would probably have been 7.7.

But moving to 9.0 was the equivalent to a full version upgrade, with a price to match. Sure, there were only a handful of new features, but it was a decent marketing tool to keep the Mac OS alive under Mac OS X arrived.

In the scheme of things, it’s really hard to understand why Apple is so stingy with its numbering system for Mac OS X, except, perhaps, to postpone the inevitability of Mac OS 11. Indeed, based on Apple’s current operating system schedule, you won’t have to worry about that until the next decade.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

Related Articles:

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