This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
Who's sorry now? Well, I'm sort of sorry that I'm even writing this. It's not like nobody has ever written anything on any weblog about backing up data. That topic, moreover, is certainly not in the same league as, for example, Ismail and the Safavids, or Robert Bechtle's Religious Art. Nevertheless, I feel a sort of duty to write about it because I recently passed the anniversary of the time I was able to pull off a last-minute rescue of everything on my laptop's hard drive. The gods, assuming that any of them exist, were good to me, and it's payback time.
My laptop started to act up about a year ago, and I took it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store. We talked about backing it up, they gave me some advice, and I went and bought a huge external hard drive. I backed up all the essential files before erasing the laptop's hard drive in an attempt to fix it. Ultimately that laptop had to be sent back to Apple four times until they got it working again. In the meantime I got a new one. So, you see, although I'm sort of sorry now for writing about such as dull subject as backups, I would have been a lot sorrier if I had not backed up my own drive last year.
In the year since then, I learned something. Us Apple fans will have a feature called "Time Machine" when the new operating system called Leopard comes out, presumably next October. As I understand it, Time Machine does the backing up automatically for you and when you want to find data that got erased (photos, music files, emails, whatever) it supposedly will make it easy to find it.
While waiting for the Leopard Time Machine, one can back up to CD's (they don't hold much, they sometimes fail, and it's a nuisance) or back up one's smaller files to Apple's iDisk, which costs a hundred bucks a year. Or we can do what human nature tells us to do, which is to forget about backups, which are in the same category as rotating our tires, making estimated tax payments in advance, or writing to Aunt Clara. Sure, some of us do all of that stuff on schedule, and scrupulously. Others, like me, are ornery cusses, and don't, or do it late. Meanwhile there is a bright spot on the otherwise dull gray backup horizon: Amazon's Jungle Disk. (The logo is a hard drive icon covered with leopard skin. Hmmm…) Backing up to the Jungle Disk is incredibly cheap. Yesterday I backed up all my iTunes and all my photos and it cost me $1.40. (There's also a monthly charge of fifteen cents per gigabyte.) It took many hours, it slowed down my laptop, and it took a little low-grade geekery to figure out how to do it right, but hey, the price is right. When Leopard comes out, will we able to back up Time Machine to the Jungle Disk? We'll find out. For the time being, it's good to know sometimes, that there's a jungle out there.
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