I recently had a hard drive failure on my primary HD in my mac pro (desktop, the old shape). The machine wouldn't boot into the OS at all.

I bought a new HD and ran the recovery tool which gave me an option to clone from another drive. I figured I might as well give it a try even though the old HD seemed completely dead.

After a couple of hours the machine rebooted using the new HD. The amazing part is not only were are my files perfectly intact, but the exact same applications I had open when the old HD died opened up automatically on the new HD.

Time Capsule is interesting, it's been consistent since its release in 2008 and has worked flawlessly for me. Compare that to Windows backup which changes to a new incompatible product with every new version of Windows and is so riddled with flaws its unusable.

I'm on the whole pretty happy with Windows, but I've never understood how they can consistently fail to deliver a working easy to use backup solution out of the box for decades. Mere incompetence shouldn't be able to deliver such terrible implementations, it's almost like they're actively trying to fuck it up.