kirktastic

Back Home. My MacBook Pro is back from its trip to the Apple Spa and Therapy Centre to work through its issues of not wanting to communicate on the internets. I restored the HD from the image I made before its started getting sick so it is 100% back in business. There’s a new Logic Board and AirPort antenna inside and it seems to be working exactly as it should. God Bless Apple. So now the old PowerBook goes back onto the shelf for its eventual sale on eBay or Craigslist.

Back Your Shit Up. This is a great time to remind you that making backups is so important. I do two kinds. Because I have a Mac, I don’t have to do it as often as Windows people do, but it is better safe than sorry.

a. Clone the drive every once and a while. Especially if you plan on taking your notebook on the road for a while and it might get jostled around or stolen. For the Mac, Carbon Copy Cloner is a free utility to do this. You get an external USB or FireWire drive and clone your notebook’s hard drive completely. On a mac, if your notebook’s hard drive breaks, you can just boot to that external hard drive and you’re back in business. You can then clone it back to the new hard drive on the notebook and you’re mobile.

b. Do frequent backups of your important files. I use Deja Vu for this. It makes a copy of my Users folder every few weeks and just changes the stuff that changed. This is especially important for your photographs and mp3s and movies.

c. Back some shit up off site. With .Mac you can back up to a gig of stuff to their secure servers. I back up my Documents folder every Sunday night. This is where I have a bunch of receipts, serial numbers, and other stuff that if there was a fire I’d need. Because it is on .Mac, I can just push a button on my Mac mini and bring all that stuff to it. I could get the files on any computer on the internets if need be.

[.Mac and Tiger let you sync stuff like your bookmarks, calendar and address book [my cell phone and all of my macs have the exact same details in the address book. And I can access that from any computer on the internet... If only it would talk to my Windows system at work, but I've given up on that]. between multiple macs. It also lets you sync your Keychain — where all of your passwords and account names/numbers are kept so if you want the computer to remember the password for some site, it will and it will on all of your Macs. When I had to use the PowerBook while the MacBook Pro was in the shop, I was instantly able to have the same bookmarks and login credentials I had on the MacBook Pro. And all of the stuff I’ve added last week are now on the Mac Book. In other words, it is so fucking simple to keep your shit together it makes me wonder why anyone uses Windows.]