Evening all,

I have noticed something in TM and I think its a feature, could just as easily be a bug an if it is I hope it does not get fixed.

I have recently( in the past few days) updated Quicktime player from 7.2.1 to 7.3. Today my TM drive has been connect all day ( not a normal situation for me ). Anyway, downloaded some Transformer theme remixs for tfw2005.com and did a right click to open in Quicktime player.

I was expecting to just click on QT player. But no, it listed Quicktime player (7.2.1) and Quicktime player (7.3). I clicked the 7.3 and it worked as expected. When I clicked the 7.2.1 I noticed the led on the TM drive pulse. WTF. Sure enough I could have both open and confirmed the different versions.

Now it gets interesting. I disconnected the TM drive. Upon right clicking only one Quicktime player listed, no version numbers and it was 7.3. Reconnect the TM drive, right click, same again only one version. Whats going on. I know I saw it.

Here is the kicker. Goto your applications folder and click the Time Machine button. I zoomed back through time to some of the earlier backups. Exit Time Machine.

Right click on the mp3 again and bam, multiple versions listed again. Very cool and potentially useful for confirming if shit gets broken when you update versions. Zip into TM, no need to recover the app and do the right click and choose what version you want.

I just tried it again now with Transmission and it listed 0.93, 0.92 and 0.91.

Anyway, I think its cool. Might help someone if something goes weird with an app.

Chris.

Good discovery indeed. There really needs to be an option to switch off versions on certain drives though. Just note that Quicktime player is just a player - the real "playing" goes on in Mac OS X itself. You wont be able to check if older versions of Quicktime itself work or not. This is different to other programs such as Transmission.

Quite true. Also for apps that have kernel extensions like Fusion may not behave properly if "accessing" an old version. For the stand alone apps though, handy indeed.

Something new to me that I found. On my finder windows I have the action button, the gear symbol. This also appears in finder windows in Time Machine.
Two options that are of particular interest.
1) Delete this back up of the file (or words to that effect)
2) Delete all instances of the file (or words to that effect)

So, if you have wondered how to delete files from Time Machine backups its that easy.

Chris

I think it's bad, opens too many cans of worms.

Good spotting about the file deletion, I'll add that to my article.

How is the article coming?

I have noticed this as well, but thought it was a "Leopard" thing. (I have my TM drive on when my Mac is on - always)
It is also like the dialog that appears when you first run a downloaded program, saying something to the effect of this was downloaded from the web, are you sure you want to run it - a leopard thing.....