I guess things can’t be all bad today–I’m typing this on my revived laptop.
You may remember that my laptop died 22 sad days ago and I set about repairing it myself, however ill-advised that may have been (let’s just say three of the screws came out with the help of Mr. Power Drill–let’s hope they weren’t important).
Well, it seems to be working. The next step is to access our backup of the old laptop and see what we can salvage. I’m hoping we can salvage a lot, cuz I don’t want to re-setup all my personal settings.
Now’s a good time to say a prayer over your own harddrive and backup drive. What’s that? You don’t have a backup drive? Oh, you poor soul. $200 (or a lot less) can save you a lot of heartache. If you can’t afford to lose what’s stored on your computer, then don’t. Get a backup drive and start backing up today. Or start backing up to a handy server somewhere in cyberspace. Better yet, do both.
Another lesson from this whole experience is how much we relied on our laptop. Wow. I’m surprised we lasted this long. But once the shaking stopped it did get easier. Don’t take your technological wonder toys for granted.
Would it be wrong of me to turn this into an ad for Time Machine? I’m surprised you didn’t mention it.
Still, I agree, backing up is really important. I’ve tried Apple’s own Backup app in Tiger. It’s OK, but it’s limited by the size of .Mac. I tried Mozy and it was way, way too slow. So, Time Machine it is!
Backup actually works pretty well if you back up to something besides .Mac (like an external drive larger than your own hard drive). But Backup appears to be only available to .Mac subscribers, which is rather disappointing. Obviously you should need a .Mac account to backup to .Mac servers, but you should be able to use .Mac to backup to an external hard drive without having to be a .Mac subscriber.
I don’t know much about Time Machine, but anything that improves this area would be good.