Marianne Schultz

the musings of a geeky girl

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Backing up is (not) a bitch

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I complained most vociferously about Time Machine recently when it up and quit on me without any real warning, as well as Tweeted about my husband’s own failure-to-back-up issues when his MacBook’s hard drive went boobies up in the water a little while ago. Since my MacBook Air is now the center of my work and personal life, backing up religiously is now top of mind for me and I’m considering adding one more back-up option in case Something Really Bad happens.

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.

I hereby dub thee “The Knight of Schultz Back-ups”!
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. 😉

My new pet: Snow Leopard

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Fortunately, it’s not a real Snow Leopard or my Great Dane would have some serious issues with it – as would we, since I’m quite sure humans can be considered exceptionally convenient fast food snacks for Snow Leopards, always ready to give a good chase to kick in that predator instinct before being gulped down at a piping hot 98.7º.

Silliness aside, I finally installed Snow Leopard two weekends ago, backing up my hard drive twice (via Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner) before erasing my hard drive with Disk Utility and doing a clean install. I didn’t transfer any settings from the clone of my Leopard installation, only copying my music, photos, and emails directly. I did let MobileMe take care of mail settings and rules, my Safari bookmarks, and my contacts and calendars, which it handled without any problems. I’ve been slowly re-insalling apps from scratch and have been trying to pare down what I use. I was particularly frustrated with Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6, which installs a bunch of other useless crap that I’d rather forego, but the installer doesn’t offer the ability to customize the installation to do this. Why does Adobe think I want an extra 345MB of my hard drive space for this Adobe Bridge CS3 crap? Hint to Adobe: I don’t want it. Space is at a premium on my 128GB SSD, thank you very much.

64-bit, baby!
My MacBook Air’s processor is 64-bit capable so I did a minor bit of system file modification to enable 64-bit by default. I didn’t do any scientific testing to time how long it took to do common tasks before enabling this, but my inner clock informally tells me that there really hasn’t been much of a difference in speed. I use Safari as my primary browser and I’m sad to say that it still gets bogged down and is not as responsive as I’d like it to be even when running in 64-bit mode. The new access features in the Finder (new Expose and Stacks capabilities) are nice, but not earth-shattering. I no longer have problems with Bluetooth acting up, which is great since that usually got me mad enough to pound on my poor Bluetooth keyboard in frustration. Time Machine operates less obtrusively before – I rarely even notice when it’s running anymore. And, I’d say that my MacBook Air is running a bit cooler – the fans don’t seem to run as much as they did on Leopard.
All in all, I see very subtle changes but nothing spectacular. So far, it still seems worth the $25 (thanks to Amazon and their slightly lower price for it) I paid for Snow Leopard and I have no complaints about it at all. Plus, the clean install I did really made me feel better about my Mac though I still have some cleaning up to do to get back some more hard drive space. My next major move is to install Parallels to run one measly application that won’t work with CrossOver, though I may see if I can get my husband to do it on his Mac (he has a shiny new 320GB hard drive in his MacBook now and has the room to spare) so I won’t have to. Muahahahahaha…

Ode to Snow Leopard – a.k.a, Snow Leopard looks cool and I’m a horrible poet

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Thou still uninstalled OS of loveliness,
Thou upgrade of smaller size and faster speed!
Yes, yes, I’ll stop. No more horrid Apple-inspired attempts at regurgitating poetry I last studied in high school. I promise.

Are you talkin’ to me? Are YOU talkin’ to ME?
You’re probably wondering how I like Snow Leopard so far, right? I hate to disappoint, particularly since I dub myself “macgirl,” but I haven’t installed it yet. I was out of town all last week, and while there was an Apple store nearby, I did not go out to buy it on release day because a) it was over 100º where I was and I despise going outside when it’s assured that I’ll break into a sweat the moment I step out the door, and b) I did not have all of my gear nor enough time to do a clean install then. So, I’ve since ordered Snow Leopard from Amazon (and saved $5 over the price from Apple directly – woo hoo!) and should get it shortly.
I plan to do a clean install (i.e., wipe my hard drive before installation and transfer documents, media, etc. manually afterward) which takes a bit of work but makes me happy. Why? Because I’m paranoid and like to start with a “clean” set-up on my Mac once a year or so. Plus, there’s less of a chance of having some corrupted file/setting/whatever act up and cause some unexpected chaos.
I’m still very impressed that Apple priced Snow Leopard at just $29, though I’m not quite sure how the math works out for them to make any money on it with the hundreds of software engineers they’ve had working on it for over a year now. I won’t worry too much about them, though, since I’m quite sure I’ll be buying yet more stuff from them in the near future to make up for any shortfall.
There are already multiple reviews of Snow Leopard up, including this one from Macworld magazine and this one by Engadget. There’s also this entertaining blog post/rant by Merlin Mann about his experience upgrading. From what I’ve read so far, it is faster most of the time and includes some nice tweaks and I’m looking forward to some 64-bit goodness. Unfortunately, it sounds like Mail is still the opposite of robust, but I suppose I need to wait for a major OS upgrade to get something meaningful there.
I expect to spend several hours one day this weekend doing the upgrade, complete with rolled-up sleeves, hair in disarray from frequent pulling, and vile curses sullying the air around me. I’m hoping that if I expect that, it will actually go much better. Reverse Murphy’s Law, perhaps? No? Damn.
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