I want to tell you a story. I was very hesitant at first because I knew that I would have to take quite a bit of flack from some people, however I feel that in the end it is best for everyone that I share this story. You see, this morning my Mac died. Okay, not so much died as crashed, but for all intense and purposes it died.
Now this is the point at which Reid will say: “I thought Macs didn’t crash”, or “I told you they suck”, or just plain “Ha ha!”. But before he and his PC Zealots (read: losers) jump on the Mac Hate wagon I feel I must relay the whole story to you, and explain why despite all this I still love Macs, in fact probably more so then ever.
You see yesterday I was discussing how much I love the new Macbook Pros and how badly I wanted one. I should have known better. Last time I did this was with the new iPods and it caused my dear sweet iPod to die on me. You think I would have learned my lesson… but apparently not.
I woke up this morning to a completely black screen. This was nothing unusual, in fact it has happened to me on numerous occasions and usually all that was needed was a reboot. So I rebooted and went to the washroom. When I returned I found one of the worst images a mac user could see… the blinking question mark folder. Shit.
Essentially to make a long story short(er) my drive had become corrupted, and was going to need to be reformatted. Shit.
Now normally this is the point in which I would curl up into a little ball and make small cooing noises, whilst rocking back and forth. However today was slightly different. How you ask? One simple answer: SuperDuper!
You see, because Leo and Merlin remind me nearly every other episode of TWiT or MacBreak Weekly I eventually decided to download a copy of SuperDuper! and start cloning my hard-drive. Essentially what SuperDuper! allows one to do is make a direct 1:1 copy of their drive to another bootable drive in case something like this does ever occur, and with the newest version you can even store it alongside your Time Machine backups (more on that later).
So once I determined that my Hard drive was indeed corrupted, I booted into my firewire backup drive and was back up and running my Mac exactly as it was a few weeks ago (I last made a backup when Bill and Mitch were over). This meant that I had essentially everything, minus a few applications/files… including a couple of projects that I’ve been working on for class. Shit.
But fear not sweet children, all is well! Because dear sweet Uncle Steve was smart enough to build an automatic backup system into Leopard. Yes, I speak of course of Time Machine. Thanks to Time Machine I was able to go back to last night and restore my home directory to the state it was in last night, which meant anything that was newly created between now and the clone I made a few weeks ago were back on my mac. Bitchin’!
So why do I love macs more so then ever? The whole process took only a few hours of my morning and I was back up and running. Were I on a PC I likely would not be in the same position (in fact when this happened to me a few years ago on my PC I lost everything, as did my Dad the three times his PC crashed). Were it not for SuperDuper! and Time Machine I would probably still be curled up in a ball cooing away.
Having said that, this is not a perfect system. Just having Leopard/Time Machine doesn’t mean you are fine if your Mac dies. Time Machine will merely keep a backup of your files however you cannot boot to the drive as is and be up and running in a few hours like I was. In fact the process is much more complex. That’s where SuperDuper! earns it’s name.
As I mentioned before, you can clone your hard-drive using SuperDuper! and make a bootable backup, alongside your Time Machine Backups. The process is fairly simple and instructions can be found here.
I got lucky. I had a recent clone (not as recent as I would have liked, and I have learned my lesson about that), had all my media on seperate external drives, and had been running Leopard which meant Time Machine was backing up my important data. However this could have ended badly, like it has for so many before me.
So this is when I get all serious. Backup your data! Go to Costco tonight, buy a 500gb firewire drive (they’re dirt cheap these days), download SuperDuper!, set up a schedule, and start backing up. If you have Leopard, make sure Time Machine is up and running. If you don’t have Leopard you should really consider it – it’s a really great OS and Time Machine is incredible. In fact by reading this sentence you have hereby agreed to follow my instructions and start backing up this weekend. While today you may not understand why its worth taking the time/money, you might just be thanking yourself tomorrow. Believe me, your drives will fail eventually, and three weeks before finals is a bad time to lose your data!
So backup for Christ’s sake! You can thank me later.
God bless you SuperDuper! You’ve earned your name.
