Backing up is (not) a bitch

I’ve been researching some on-line options – the kind that offer unlimited storage and automated back-ups for about $5 per month – like BackBlaze and Carbonite. I think I will be trying Carbonite first, since they currently have a promo going as a sponsor of TWIT’s MacBreak Weekly podcast (which is my favorite Mac podcast) that gives you a couple of months for free with the “twit” promo code, though I just noticed on their site that compatibility with Snow Leopard isn’t coming until November. Hmmm. I am now hoping Something Really Bad does not happen between now and then.

Regarding my husband, the one good thing about the hard drive disaster that he suffered through is that he is now a fan of backing up. I took care of finding him a new hard drive (a Western Digital Scorpio 320GB 7200 RPM drive, bitches!) which has more space than he will ever need since he uses my iTunes library on my Mac and only uses his Mac for internet surfing, emailing, and storing a few documents here and there. We installed Snow Leopard on his Mac and I set up him to connect to the external hard drive connected to my Airport Extreme Base Station, making a partition I’d previously set up for him there is Time Machine drive. He was a little miffed at me since I’d recently re-partitioned that drive and made his part smaller, but he hadn’t been using it at all before the infamous drive failure and I thought the space would go to better use for my Time Machine back-up. You snooze, you lose, little buddy! Now that his Mac is back up and running, he wanted to get a larger drive for us to share and we are going to split a 2 TB (TB!) Western Digital My Book Studio Edition drive between us for our Time Machine back-ups. It arrived last week, so I’ll be setting that up shortly and will retire the other drive for desktop use – I’ll probably turn that one into my weekly cloning drive and free up the portable drive I’d been using for clones for other stuff.

Forgive me for the unkind and mildly-evil thoughts I’m about to write down. When the hard drive in my husband’s MacBook crashed, he vilified Macs, saying that I always told him that they were supposed to be more reliable and easy to use and just look at what happened, dammit! Of course, it somehow became my fault (my husband excels at boogerheadedness from time to time) and he ignored my claims that hard drive failures are independent of the operating system and can happen to any machine. Anyway, in near-karmic retribution, the hard drive on his trusty Dell laptop that he uses for work – a computer which is incidentally newer than his MacBook – failed about 2 weeks after his MacBook’s. I would not have wanted to be the IT guy who helped him with it at work – he spent countless hours trying to retrieve his files (yeah, no back-ups at his company either – bad IT!) and was only able to salvage some of them in the end and move them to a new hard drive. While I don’t wish hard drive failure on anyone (well, maybe one or two people), my husband has now learned that hard drive failures can happen in any machine. And he hasn’t said one bad word about Macs since. 😉