I'm a Mac fan. Not quite a fanatic, but pretty close to it.

I'm also a big fan of backups - not just for myself, but for other people as well. I've long bemoaned the reality that backups are Just Too Hard for most folk, too hard to manage, to expensive to maintain, too large to deal with in any sort of affordable way. Too Hard.

The techies at Apple seem to be changing all that, in OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard).

leopard will (we're told) include Time Machine ("A Giant Leap Forward for Backup"). Time Machine can back up to an external drive, or to network attached storage (Well, the website says 'to a Mac OS X Server computer', but I'm hoping I can also back up to a Linux box, since X-serves are still out of my home budget). The linked page above includes a great example video about how Time Machine works.

Personally, OS X 10.4 didn't offer anything sufficiently compelling to require me to upgrade from 10.3. 10.5 might just change all that.