Tuesday, April 01, 2008

TIme Machine Came In Handy

I use iGTD to manage tasks. Unfortunately the developer has disappeared (some personal issues) and it's not very stable on Leopard. I had no serious problems with it until tonight. Every time I entered a new task it crashed. I looked in the forums and didn't find much to help but on the assumption it was some kind of database corruption I used Time Machine to restore my database from yesterday. It solved my problems. Without Time Machine doing hourly backups I probably wouldn't have had a backup within the last couple of weeks.

It was easy to use. I found the iGTD database in the Finder and clicked the TIme Machine icon in the Dock. I scrolled back through a few iterations checking the time stamps on the database file. I selected the latest one from yesterday and clicked the restore button. TIme Machine told me the file existed in the current folder and did I want to replace (copy over) the current one or keep both around. I choose both and my current file was renamed with " (Original)" appended and the old file was restored. It almost couldn't have been easier.

While iGTD was very good and free, a new version was being written before the developer disappeared a few months ago. iGTD was particularly good at repeating tasks, allowing the repeat to be based on either the start (e.g., every Tue) or completion dates (e.g., 3 weeks from when I last finished). The other good task management apps are:
OmniFocus - advanced, some say complex, too expensive at $80
Midnight Inbox - I loved the unique processing features but found it under powered and unstable. It's undergoing a rewrite and I'm really looking forward to version 2 ($35)
Things - Lots of people like it. I was waiting for 1.0 but I see 0.9 adds powerful looking repeating tasks ($50, $40 before it ships)

1 comment:

The Dad said...

Excellent news about TM. Can't wait to get one. On the GTD side, I'm still looking for that perfect web-based solution. I need it to be web-based since I use multiple computers (and BBerry). For a while I was making my own Wiki (pbwiki.com) which worked great, but they eliminated the ability to edit a page via BBerry for some reason. So now I'm using Google Notebook. Works well. Each set of notes has an equivalent "mobile" page that displays well on BBerry. And though you cant edit notes on BBerry, you can easily add new ones.