So my faithful computer crashed and died on Monday. Hard drive gave up the ghost, and after five years, I can't complain. Tech got what he could off the old box and I got a new one.
Most important stuff I had backed up. But there are always things you don't think about, and sure enough, those go away. (I had back-ups of my address book, and prefs for my browsers, for instance, but port them to the new system, which is no longer Tiger but now Leopard ate those right up. I should have made a text list so I could manually re-key them, and actually I have a couple of those, but they aren't up to date ...)
Still, I got most of what I really need -- book manuscripts and pictures, and I should be able to cobble together the rest eventually ..
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Anon-in-Oz: Wondered what happened to you :). Must admit to being guilty of expecting the PC to last forever as well. Seriously though go buy yourself a 32GB usb drive. Yours will then be bigger than anyone else's ;) and you'll hopefully avoid this in the future.
Well, now that you have Leopard, think about getting a Time Capsule and using Time Machine. I've got two Macs backing up to a 512 GB unit regularly, and have backed up the neighbor's laptop once when she was going to be traveling. Having used pro-grade backup tools in my career, I can say that Time Machine isn't an enterprise-quality backup system, but it sure works great for the average Joe, and the usability of the interface is brilliant.
Overall, cheap insurance.
I am backing up my imac with time machine (to a time capsule *and* a seagate external) - I learned my lesson when the PC stuff put a gun in its mouth and the pretty patterns landed on the external HD and with acid-like effect killed that too.
Yep, I got Time Machine, a five hundred gig Firewire drive and hourly back-ups. I'm still sending myself copies of book mss so they'll be on the server if my house burns down ...
You might also consider paying the $100 per year for a MobileMe account (formerly "DotMac"), which comes with a couple gigs of online storage that you can sync your documents to. The upside is that if you ever go on vacation or anything and want to have access to your documents, you can log in with most any browser.
Also note that the "family pack" is $150 and has five accounts, so it gets cheap fast if you spread the wealth.
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