SmartRemarks

I love my PowerBook. My computer is my life… or at least, it allows me to conduct it, and contains most of the relevant details of it, and connects me with the world beyond it. And using a Mac makes the whole process, really, downright fun sometimes.

Nevertheless, I admit to living dangerously where the safety of my loved one is concerned. I know the mantra that hard-drive failures are a matter of “not if, but when”… but despite that, I’ve never really had a regular backup routine. I have some archived files that are years old, but most of the more recent documents on my current machine (purchased over three years ago now) aren’t backed up.

Recently, however, I decided to own up to this irresponsible conduct and change my ways. I’ve been putting off a system upgrade (from OS X 10.4 to 10.5; this Mac is from the last pre-Intel generation, so it won’t run 10.6), but I knew that before installing a major upgrade a backup would be a Really Good Idea, just in case Something Went Wrong. This drive has worked flawlessly for as long as I’ve had the computer—in fact, I’ve never had a drive failure—but better safe than sorry, right? Plus, its 80GB capacity was about 75% full, and I know performance starts to take a hit above that level, and I figured before I started weeding out old files I should have everything backed up. And I expected that regular incremental backups would be easier after the upgrade, anyway, thanks to Apple’s nifty TimeMachine utility, so any headaches involved with this “safety” backup would be a one-time thing.

So yesterday I pulled a pristine new 500GB external drive out of its box, and attached it to my trusty PowerBook with a FireWire cable, and downloaded the latest version of the handy freeware backup utility SuperDuper!, and carefully shut down everything else that was running, and had the program begin making a bootable clone of my PowerBook drive on the external drive.

And guess when my hard drive decided to fail?

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