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Hard drive platter
In the past, I've been fairly lucky in terms of being able to replace one Mac laptop with another before the first was completely dysfunctional. You'll notice I said "laptop"; all the Macs I've purchased for my own personal use have been laptops, starting with my very first PowerBook 180. My luck just ran out; my somewhat ancient G4 1.5 ghz. Powerbook 17'' catastrophically died yesterday. It's well out of AppleCare, and almost four years old with daily very enthusiastic use. I've just replaced it with a refurbed MacBook from the Apple store online.
It took me longer than I'd expected to set up the new laptop (about four hours), since this MacBook doesn't have Firewire. I almost went with a new MacBook for that reason alone, but it would have ended up being more than I really wanted to spend. But the Migration assistant worked quite well using a regular (I didn't even need a bridge cable!) Ethernet cable. I mounted my Firewire backup drive on another Mac, and used Sharing to copy a few items, and used the new iTunes 9 Home Sharing feature to synch iTunes libraries; that was absolutely fabulous.
I'm a belt-and-suspenders sort of person when it comes to backups. I have a portable drive that I regularly copy my Home directory to. I also burn DVDs fairly regularly, and make incremental backups of important data to USB stick, and to an online backup account. As it turned out, I ended up going to an older backup up for a couple of files that had, apparently, been corrupted, so it was a good thing to have. I've been using StrongSpace for a few years, via my Web host, but I note that there are now multiple subscription-based (Mozy and iDrive, and BackJack, are three) (and even a few free) online backup services. And there's Mac.com I mean Me.com, to some extent. I'll be writing about those in the next few days.
I'm thinking that at some point in the future, I'll start using OS X's TimeMachine over a network to backup all the Macs, and maybe, even Apple's own TimeCapsule, which does have some merit for a multiple-Mac wireless LAN. But first, this weekend, I think I'll migrate my new MacBook to Snow Leopard.
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