Backing Up is Hard to Do (or is it?)
We don't know about you, but we love a surprise. However, Meryl ended up with a nasty one on the eve of her birthday no less. Late that evening a mouse she was using suddenly started acting erratic. She watched in horror as the cursor started "moving" files from folder to folder, as if the entire computer (she runs a PowerBook G4) was going crazy. She shut down her computer, and when she started it up again, tried to restore some of the "moved" files. The next morning, many of her basic preferences had been inadvertently lost.
Luckily, Meryl has the help of her partner, a brilliant technologist (Frederic Rudman), who, with the aid of Apple Technical Support (and many, many hours of time) were able to restore the computer to working condition, and reconstitute her applications, documents, preferences, and other settings.
But here's the rub: it was TREMENDOUSLY TIME CONSUMING. Overall, not recommended for the faint-of-heart. "Fred alone spent an entire day of his life," Meryl comments. "Then, I had to spend another two days at least re-installing serial numbers or product keys on applications, testing things out, etcetera.
She ended up with an entire new way of doing backups, and has now upgraded her Mac OS to Leopard, which has built-in backup capabilities known as Time Machine.
There are 2 morals to this story:
1) For God's Sake, back up everything.
2) For God's sake, don't operate without a hell of a lot of disk space.
That, as it turned out, was the cause of the "crazy mouse" antics. Because Meryl's computer had been operating with under 2 GB of memory, things were very vulnerable indeed on her PowerBook G4. In her defense, who knew? Certainly this was NOT in the manual, and can only be considered an insider secret.
AS FAR AS BACKING UP GOES
You need to know your own work habits, and needs. Some people keep 3 copies of everything. Some folks back up to services like Apple's iDisk.
(Linda always backs up to an external drive automatically, and so has been saved from the perils of what happened to Meryl).
Whatever works for you, do something. NEVER have files in only one location (unless you don't care about them). Back up on hard drives, back up to a Web service, or back up to DVDs. But back up.
AS FAR AS DISK SPACE GOES
Well, there are a lot of options for getting things OFF your computer and ONTO something else. What Meryl is now examining is what can come off her computer (documents, pictures, videos, and applications she doesn't use), to be stored elsewhere. She is now happily operating with closer to 25 GB of space on her hard drive, and hopes to double or triple that amount of space in the near future.
All's well that ends well.
