Time Machine adds local backups and document locking

Apple’s Time Machine has been slightly tweaked within OS X Lion, adding caching of local backups of a user’s system changes and documents to the boot drive, which are later transferred to your usual backup source once it is connected to your Mac.

As a result of this new feature, Time Machine shows within it a history of up to a week of local backups. However, due to the potential downsides of these local backups (such as having a document you don’t want to change overwritten by Lion’s Auto-Save feature), Apple has implemented an option to lock documents a certain amount of time after the last edit within Time Machine’s preferences.

Of course, these new local backups don’t solve every potential problem that could arise, such as a failing hard drive, although they are certainly useful for users who don’t always have their external backup drives handy.

Via [TUAW]