The Place to Be!

Baby got Back (up)!

So, my big thing for the past few months has been the Hackintosh. Been having a blast with it and steadily moving towards it being my main day-to-day system. Having said that, the dual 2Ghz G5 has been my main system for 5 years and, despite not getting a lot of face time lately, it remains the primary repository for all of my docs, music, movies, contacts, photos etc. I still sync my iPhone on the G5 every morning, I still set up calendar events there and sync them with google…basically, yeah, I use the Hackintosh most of the time now, but the G5 is still the vault for Digital Dbot. So, it kinda sucked bawlz when Mrs. Dbot told me she heard some clicking noises from the office and
thought something was wrong with the G5. I checked it out and sure enough the main drive had gone belly up on me. Years of photos, music purchases, family holiday videos etc were on that drive which now only would be useful as a loud clacking metronome. Did I panic? Well, maybe a little, but not much! That’s because I knew Time Machine was dutifully backing everything up daily for me. Man, I gotta give it to Apple on this one. I’ve used everything from high end enterprise backup systems to low-end Windows and Mac backup solutions and there is something nice about the drop dead simplicity of Time Machine. It doesn’t have many…well, any, power features. But, what it brings to the table in ease of set up and awesome integration hooks for restoring data from within apps is fantastic. Actually, that is Time Machine’s power feature, it’s so easy to use that people will use it. For example, my dad has had several computers dating all the way back to XT days and other than occasionally backing some stuff up to floppy using an old DOS based backup prog (My
Backup) he didn’t do much. If he suffered a catostrophic drive failure he would’ve been screwed. He bought an iMac a couple of years ago and guess what, he has been doing full backups ever since. Not because he all of a sudden cared more about his data, but because he plugged an external drive in to the iMac and it automatically popped up a prompt asking him if he wanted to use it for backups. He said yes and that was the end of it. No configuration necessary. One mouse click and he joined the ridiculously small club of home users who do full and incremental backups of their systems.
Anyway, getting back to the G5, it was down hard. So I took the time machine drive down to the Hackintosh and in short order had all of the stuff we needed access to restored for use. Then GelOhPiG gave us a 640GB hard drive as a wedding present. I slapped that bad boy in the G5 in place of the old drive, installed Leopard and restored everything from the Time Machine drive to it and everything’s humming along beautifully. This would’ve been a much sadder story if I hadn’t been backing up. So, make sure you’re doing your backups, folks. Whether its RSYNC, Windows Backup, Time Machine, XCOPY, SuperDuper, Retrospect, Backup Exec, NetBackup…whatever, back your stuff up. It can make a potentially suck ass, wanna cry like a little baby moment into an “opportunity” for a fresh OS install with no data loss

***Update***
GelohPig did the 10.5.7 update on his Hackintosh and forgot to do the -v -f switches on his first reboot. So, it looked like the update screwed his build up. Luckily, rebooting using the switches cleaned everything right up and he’s running fine again. The beauty of it is that he wasn’t doing any backups and would’ve been toast if there really was a problem. The gravity of that wasn’t lost on Geloh, lol, he ordered a terabyte drive that same night to start doing Time Machine backups with. Booya, another brother’s gonna be doing his backup thang!

-D