Leopard/Time Machine Saved my Bacon

Almost all of my development work is done in a virtual environment. I run the IDE's on my local Mac but all the servers and development files live on the drives of one or more virtual servers. I've found this to be a very efficient method to write both CF and FLEX applications as I can literally model an entire networking environment on just a couple of virtual machines. I will generally copy the web root from the virtual server to a folder on my Mac's hard drive at least once a week, sometimes more depending on the amount and nature of the work I've done over a given time span. I've got a bit of a propensity to play with the configuration of my virtual servers to extract every last bit of performance (or convenience to me) from them. This can sometimes be a dangerous proposition if you've got an intricate virtual domain built with interdependencies among the various server images. Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I decided I was going to turn one of my virtual "member servers" into a Domain Controller in a test AD I've got set up. This would save me some time and resources as I would no longer have to boot two server images to approximate a functional active directory based network. Unfortunately, it was late and I took some shortcuts that I shouldn't have and I ended up a 39GB image of a dog terd. Wow. Realizing that I'd just blown away about a week and a half worth of development effort on an HR application that I'm working on, I decided to just go to bed and start fresh after a bit of rest. First thing the next morning, I headed up to the office where my Time Machine backup disk lives and about 30 minutes later, I was restored to the point where I was when I left the office on Monday afternoon. Ordinarilly, my backup images would have been too old to pull this off, but since I have used Time Machine religiously since I set up Leopard on the Macbook, I had a copy that was current as of that Monday. Once you have Time Machine set up to run properly, you never have to mess with it again until you need it. It runs in the background, most of the time without you even knowing about it, and backs up all your most valuable assets. Once restored, I booted my virtual server and, after a check disk performed automatically by Windows 2003 Server (I assume this was the result of backing up a server image that was probably running at the time it was backed up), I was back in business. Time Machine saved me from a potentially disasterous situation and, in my opinion, paid for the cost of the Leopard upgrade with a single recovery. If you haven't looked at Time Machine yet, run, don't walk, to your Mac and fire it up!