The Thursday before last I turned on my laptop and all I heard was a click, click, click… the Hard Drive would not start… bad times! After a few minutes of trying to see if it’d spin I decided to get Apple Care on the phone to setup a time to take this laptop in. Thanks to Greg I didn’t end up having to be subjected to a (presumably) torturous help session with an “Apple Guru.” I was already getting the maybe you need technical support before seeing a “guru” when I explained (over the phone) do you hear that clicking noise… yeah that’s the hard drive so I don’t think there’s much that can be done over the phone. The apple phone person (they need a catchy name also) said oh, yeah you’re right you’ll need to bring that in.
Fast forward a week later I picked up my laptop from the Harbaugh house and have been spending the next day or so on and off re-installing programs. Luckily I had enabled the Time Machine function of Leopard so all my documents and programs were backed up nicely. Unfortunately, the backup I had was an upgrade backup so I decided to just re-install the operating system from scratch and pull back what documents I needed.
While it was a bit of a pain in the butt and odd being without a home computer (HTPC is setup for the living room so it’s not the best for browsing the internet or doing work on)… I guess the lesson in this post is: BACKUP YOUR COMPUTER CRAPS REGULARLY!
Welcome back lappy!
I’ve got a pretty cool app on the computer that automatically backs up every night. Like today I copied some photos off the camera, and right now they’re only in one spot. In a few hours though they’ll get backed up for some redundancy, but it takes zero thinking. I tell it to watch my images folder, mp3 folder, documents folder, etc.
It’s called Backup4all, but I believe it’s windows only.
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Yeah there was a freeware utility I used to use in windows that would sync whatever folders you wanted when ever. It ran as a service and worked well. I can’t remember the name of it though.
Backups are very important, can’t stress that enough! Get yo-self a RAIDable NAS type of storage unit and you breathe a little easier. Though just having a copy of something important in two places decreases your chance of failure a bunch, bar any natural disaster of course!
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