What Time Machine can and can't do

via DF, I came across a great review of OS X Time Machine backup software. For example:

X.5 Time Machine (Quarter Life Crisis)

...A point that is rather sore as well for me is the fact that Caches folders are completely excluded from backups. By Spotlight’s poor design the Caches folder contains a Metadata folder which applications have to store their data in if they want it to be found in the index. Those metadata files will not be in a backup. As a consequence restoring your system from a backup will leave you with an incomplete Spotlight index until you run all the applications which stored data in the Caches/Metadata folder and make sure they re-create them. Ultimately this is a Spotlight issue, I think, but with Time Machine being made by the same company, they should have had an eye on it...

Quarter Life has an extensive list of critiques: the UI is truly awful, there's no encryption of the backup (!), there's very limited control of what's backed up, etc.