I’m sorry but I have to interject a bit of negative feedback into the parade of praise about Apple's new operating system, Leopard (aka Mac OS X 10.5). I'm impressed with many of the improvements, but recent reports about the built-in backup utility, Time Machine, overlook a critical flaw: Trust Time Machine and you run the risk of losing all your data, period, if bad luck targets you and your Macintosh.

Fellow Texan Deni Connor writes about how Leopard handles backups. Over at Computerworld, Ryan Faas (I don't know where he's from) writes a full review in "Inside Leopard's Time Machine: Backups for the Rest of Us." I strongly believe the new backup process does not deserve a positive review until Apple fills a huge gap in data protection.

Back in May, I explained my Pirate Backup System (ARR). The ARR stands for Automatic, Redundant and Restorable. You should never use a backup system that doesn't include all three. Apple has two: Automatic and Restorable. The company skipped Redundant, a serious omission.

How serious? Did you notice the news report about Francis Ford Coppola's sad story? Miles Baska wrote about the theft of the film maker's laptop and external hard drive used for backups. All his backups were on that external drive, including information for the new film he planned to start shooting in February. Coppola didn't follow the Pirate Backup System, and neither does Time Machine from Apple.

The crucial missing feature in Time Machine? Redundant backup file storage. When you store all your backups on a connected external hard drive, as Time Machine demands, you protect yourself only halfway. As Coppola learned the hard way, an external hard disk does not meet the "Redundant" requirement. When the thieves take your computer, they will take the attached hard drive. When the sprinklers in your office go off by accident, the box of tapes beside your server will get just as wet as your server.

Let's compare and contrast Time Machine with an interesting backup utility called BeInSync from BeInSync Ltd. I haven't tested the product personally, but I talked to customer Kevin Boer of 3 Oceans Real Estate. Knowing that real estate success means being on the road, Boer lives out of his laptop during the workday. He actively tries to reduce the amount of paper he uses, so all his contracts and transactions ride around the Bay Area and Silicon Valley in the car seat beside him, inside his laptop.