The first thing that I'd like to do

[austin_dern]

Moving onward in my incident: One of my friends recently suffered the catastrophic loss of her computer to accidentally dropping it. While the hard drive is reported to have come through without loss of data the logic board didn't, and so a replacement is on the way. That may seem to have nothing to do with chat about the wireless network in my home, but, trust me. What the loss of the computer did was get me properly scared about the dangers of my own computer and that I don't do backups nearly often enough. I do them sometimes, and had a 120 Gigabyte external hard drive pretty much filled up with copies of my home directory from different times, roughly once a month, as well as grand strategy video games that I don't play often enough to keep on my hard drive, but often enough that I don't want to keep re-installing them. And every now and then I get to burning a DVD with parts of my home directory, since even my photograph directory is too big to fit on a single DVD.

What I obviously needed was to get a hard drive to use with Time Machine, since it's designed to just make regular backups when it can access the hard drive and that's that. The utterly insignificant question which had left me in paralyzed helplessness was first, whether to buy a ``portable'' hard drive, the kind that's powered just by a USB cable, or a fixed external hard drive which requires its own power supply. The advantage of the portable would be, of course, that it doesn't have to be plugged in so very much; the advantage of the external hard drive is that it's cheaper, or I could buy one with more memory, depending on how you want to interpret things. And then Apple went and confused everything by introducing Time Capsule.

Time Capsule is the sort of thing which leave you wondering why nobody did this before: a hard drive, intended for use as a backup, which connects by wireless so you don't have to do anything but have your computer somewhat near it. The disadvantage is it costs more; the advantage, the easier it is to use the more likely it is I do use it. I was incidentally amused to discover in a blog discussion about Effective Backup Methods a person taunting all the Mac users who praise Time Capsule for its ease and convenience on the grounds that if the Time Capsule fails then where are you? How you back up in a way which can't ever fail I don't know.

Trivia: In order to aid the United States's war effort, the civilian production of toasters, percolators, griddles, waffle irons, and heaters ended 31 May 1942. Source: Don't You Know There's A War On?, Richard Lingeman.

Currently Reading: Project Pope, Clifford Simak. Robots creating their own Pope so they can have a truly infallible religion, and the humans who drift into their lives ... this is so Simak.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I thought about getting a Time Capsule, but in the end decided to go with the more economical route of using my old hard drive as my backup drive. After all, I did just have to buy a new computer unexpectedly, so I should probably keep my other expenditures to a minimum for a while.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

In fact, if my old hard drive hadn't turned out to be pretty near full I'd probably have just used that and tried to force myself to plug it in at least once a day. Hard drives may be running in terabyte sizes for only a couple hundred dollars but I really would like to not spend that money if I can avoid it, which I can't always.

[skylerbunny.livejournal.com]

I've discovered that Time Machine will nag you with a pop-up dialog if you haven't plugged in your external hard disk for 10 days, and again at 20 days (the latter because of the most recent trip I took, where I was away from my external hard disk that long).

Given I don't have a Time Capsule, I suppose I figure that if I back things up at least every 10 days, I won't lose too much no matter what happens. Usually I do plug it in more often than that, but it's good to know it'll get annoyed if I don't.

That said, it would be nice if you could program Time Machine to nag you more often. If I could, I'd probably set it for, oh, maybe 3 days. I have no idea how that would be done, though, and it certainly isn't something mortal OS X users can change.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I'm going to try to make it a habit to do it every day.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Time Capsule: The New Programme Renewing the Old Urgency and Importance of Doing BackUps :>

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yes. But you can't deny the grandness of a system in which you just kind of be around where you normally are and the backups are made reliably, can you?

[patchoblack.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll be setting up my new iMac later today, so I should get to see what this whole Time Machine hoo-ha is all about myself. Any suggestions?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, have you got any sort of external hard drive? As long as you've got the iMac it's probably no trouble having something plugged in all the time so there's no need to fuss over a Time Capsule wireless hard drive unless you really do want one.

[orv.livejournal.com]

My only reservation about the Time Capsule is, being a wireless device, it's likely to be slower compared to using a normal external drive. However, I think Time Machine uses incremental backups, so that probably won't matter much except the first time you make a backup. This is also all speculation, as I haven't used Time Machine or a Time Capsule.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, there is a bit of a story to that, as it turns out, and against all precedent ever for my ever doing anything.

It does recommend the initial copy be done by Ethernet cable, but you need some sort of cable to connect most any wireless gadget other than Bluetooth keyboards.