[muglo] Re: MacOs10.5.6 Issues
- From: Doug Bale <dougbale@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:56:54 -0800 (PST)
--- On Thu, 12/18/08, Hawk <taylorc547@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> So much for Mac being the simple computer. Bring on
> the PC. It would seem that now even the Mac has made
> impossible for anyone but nerds and techies to use.
It's not as bad as it sounds, Jim. I just downloaded the update, installed it
by following the onscreen instructions - basically just hitting Continue or
Agree when asked -- and voila! everything still worked, and one or two minor
things worked better than ever. And I've got a ton of third-party software
(though all from pretty reliable sources). No hitches anywhere.
Here's the essential, though, and this goes back to your earlier question about
those backup sources I talked about at the October meeting: To be able to muck
about confidently with your system, whether upgrading it or adding new
third-party software that might affect it, you need to have a complete backup
somewhere other than on your internal hard drive. Otherwise, you're just
rolling the dice.
Time Machine will back up most of your files - although it's buggy as hell,
frequently copying nine files in a folder and totally ignoring the tenth - and
having it set to send those backups to an external drive will save your bacon
most of the time. But it doesn't do the copying in such a way that the external
drive can be used as a substitute startup drive in case your internal drive
goes galley-west. You have to have to your installation DVD handy, start up
from that, install its system on your external drive, and only then can you
access all the other copied files. It's a nuisance.
To make an external drive bootable - truly just plug-and-play - you need to use
something like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner, two very cheap,
super-efficient that duplicate EVERYTHING on your internal drive, in just the
form that it exists there. Then when your internal drive croaks, you just start
up normally, the computer hunts for the internal drive's system and, failing to
find it, goes on to the system of the plugged-in external and boots from that.
Bingo!
The ideal strategy, according to me, is to use both Time Machine AND either SD
or CCC, along with an external drive. Every couple of weeks, providing your
internal drive seems to be chugging along nicely without any problems, you
should make a new duplicate of it on the external drive. That guarantees you'll
have an instantly bootable backup whenever you need it, although it won't
include the few user files you might have changed since the last backup — but
those few files will have been backed up hourly by Time Machine, and you can
just drag those over in just seconds.
You can have use Disk Utility to partition your external drive so that it can
hold both your bootable copy and your Time Machine files. Better still, though,
is to have two externals, so that once you make your weekly or fortnightly
bootable backup on one of them, you can unplug that drive and squirrel it away
somewhere, leaving the other plugged in (or connected wirelessly, as with Time
Capsule) for the hourly Time Machine backups. The advantages of having your
bootable backup away from the computer - maybe even in another room or another
building - is that when lightning strikes or burglars come calling, losing your
computer won't mean losing all the stuff that's on it.
With hard drive prices so low these days, it's no reason not to have that peace
of mind.
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