The XP virtual machine I have on my Mac got itself into a bad state recently; on startup, it was trying to run ChkDsk (not something useful for the VM to do). Cancelling that on boot left a VM that just couldn't access large parts of the file system.

Fortunately, I have Time Machine backing up the VM when it runs (along with everything else).So last night I started restoring the (huge) VM file, and when I fired it up this morning, it was back to normal.

Time Machine is probably the biggest win for OS X over Windows or Linux at this point. It's not that backup solutions don't exist for the other platforms (they do), and it's not that Time Machine is without problems (network drive use can be a pain, and the Snow Leopard update gave me headaches) - but overall, it's just very easy to use. Plug in a cheap USB drive, turn Time Machine on, and you're done.

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