Saved by a time machine

Been having major computer problems today. An apple update wouldn’t install correctly, safari, mail.app and finder all seemed to either be acting funny or stop working altogether.  The main issue was Safari as it renders messages for mail.app - I couldn’t even launch safari or mail. The first thing I did was delete the preferences for both applications and restarted my laptop. Nope not it. Then I grabbed another copy of Safari and replaced it with my corrupt copy. Nope not it. All safari wanted to do was crash upon starting up. I then went back into time and replaced all of the preferences with versions from a few hours ago. I did this using time machine, which backs up your hard drive once an hour in the background. After a restart everything was completely back to normal! whew. I was starting to think I might have to do a re-install of the OS - just to get safari and mail to work.

The funny thing is - this morning I was telling a co-worker that I have been using time machine for a few weeks now and haven’t gotten any benefit out of it. Now I have.