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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 204. Leopard pre-release special. New Mac Pros waiting for Intel? French to sell legit unlocked iPhone. iPhone will get an Apple blessed SDK. iJailBreak brings AppTapp back to iPhone. Mac OS X Leopard is coming. Who should upgrade? Why upgrade? Over 300 new features. Buying Leopard. Installing Leopard. Some details on Time Machine. Early Leopard reviews. Reports of early shipments.
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A leopard can’t change his stripes and neither can a queer. — Queer as Folk (2000)
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Is anyone else sick of Adam saying the word ‘backup’?
Thanks for a great episode, but I think we get the message… we need to backup before upgrading!!!
Adam says it so often because SO many people still don’t get it. Backup, Backup, Backup! And not only backup, considering doing multiple redundant backups of your most important files, and make sure you test your backup method too. It’s useless unless it works.
Sad fact is I get about 2-3 emails a week containing the phrase, “I know you always say to backup, but…”
Also, there is another way to install Leopard. Say for instance, you happen to have a .dmg image file of Leopard. Simply put that on an external drive (or your iPod) and choose the restore from image function. That way you can install without having the disc in your DVD drive.
You mentioned app fresh as a way to check if your applications are up to date. I just stumbled across a cool widget called app update that does the same job. Definitely worth checking out.
About backing up… If you are not backed up at least twice, you are not backed up! My PowerBook hard drive died last Friday. Of course, being a graduate student I run SuperDuper! (SD) every night before I leave for home. I did this the night before my HD failed on me the next morning. So, I had the HD replaced and then tried to run SD from my external Backup to my new laptop HD. As you can guess there was a problem with a few bad sectors on my external HD that never made themselves apparent until I was trying to restore the information to my laptop. This is because of the nature of using ‘differential backups’. It turns out that the sectors of the backup drive that contained some iPhoto files had gone bad. So, SD would fail during the restore process because it could not read the bad sectors of my backup drive.
In a nutshell, I had not used or changed anything in my iPhoto database in a long time. Therefore, The problem of bad sectors never made itself known because if nothing needs to be updated (i.e. my iPhoto library had not changed in a while), then the backup software will not try to read or write to the corresponding area on the Backup drive (hence you will not know of I/O errors with that part of the drive). Now, if this data did need updating on the backup drive then the issue would have been realized much sooner.
So, I had to delete my iPhoto application and library in order to get the restore to work. This was not an issue as my iPhoto data is nothing more than a copy of what I have on my Desktop. So, I just copied my iPhoto library from there.
The lesson to learn here is to do one of two things (or both)… 1) boot off your external backup hard drive once in a while and try opening a few files or databases to make sure the integrity of your data is stable. 2) have a secondary backup of your most important files. Use multiple backup hard drives, online storage or other Macs to store your data.
I hope this helps others be aware of ‘hidden’ issues of only have one backup drive.
I have been reading about the online backup industry for a while now. Online backup is maturing and slowly getting the attention of the general consumer. One website worth mentioning is the backup review site:
http://www.BackupReview.info
This very informative site, not only posts up to date news and articles from the industry, but also lists about 400 online backup companies and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis and features a CEO Spotlight page, where senior management people from the industry are interviewed.
I am a big fan of http://www.onlinebackupvault.com
Online Backup Vault offers a secure data backup solution that is a true tape replacment. many of the other guys are data replication suites… Online Backup Vault offers daily, weekly, monrhly and annual backup, ensuring that your data is secure and that you have it when u need. In addition OnlineBackupVault.com has redundant servers, redundant internet connections and is connected to backup natrual gas generated power that is available in an instant with no down time!