Back it up

As someone who does tech support for a living, you'd think my system would be backed up and well maintained.

It's not.

I've been wanting to get another FireWire hard drive for about a year now. My 160 GB is nearly full -- I've got photos and music backed up there, but that's about it. Well, since I'm not one to save money, I went out and got a 250 GB drive last night. It's partitioned (of course), with one partition for mirroring my Powerbook and the other with OS X -- as another bootable drive.

I've had customers crying about data loss. I've had agents tell me about their customers, who "just wanted to ask one more person" to make sure "it wasn't all gone." Our advice is always to back up anything you want to save.

Things like photos have been getting backed up regularly. iTunes library stuff is archived on a semi-regular basis. Really, I don't want to be like those customers.

I'm pretty sure the Powerbook is in the early stages of main logic board failure, judging by the last few times I've restarted it. I generally don't shut it off; it sleeps happily until I wake it for the few hours of use it gets everyday. Yeah, there were a ton of more fun things I could've spent the money on, but it kept coming back to the hard drive. Stupid, right?

So much of what we hold near and dear is in an impermanent state. Photos are digital. So is music. We leave our memories and moods encoded in 1s and 0s. We don't print out photos and music is a lot easier to mange when it's from the iTunes store.

I have 459,938 files that are being copied from the Powerbook to the external HD. Maybe 5,000 of that is songs. And just under 2,000 of that is photos. The rest? Email, journal entries, things I've made in Photoshop. Files friends and family have sent me. I have never owned 459,938 possessions. I've got a shit-ton of stuff in my room (we won't talk about my storage unit). How much of it would I miss if i lost it? How much would I miss if my computer went down?

It's hard to know unless you lose it. I've been fortunate -- no natural, or unnatural, disasters, no major thefts or repossessions. I've accumulated A LOT of stuff in my 35 years on the planet, and in the 14 years I've been out on my own. I've lost things in moves, thrown things away. Lost things to divorce. For the most part, that stuff isn't preventable.

We like to joke about how much our customers are tied to their computers. But my Powerbook was ordered the day it was announced at Macworld SF in 2003, and I've had it ever since. It's never been sent in for service and generally has traveled with me when I've gone on the road. It's been a good little computer.

But four years is a long time for a computer. Next year, it will be officially obsolete according to Apple. So the time has come for me to consider a new one. And I do have a computer in mind, I just want to see what else Apple is going to come out with in the next few months before I make a purchase.

There are enough people who don't understand the Mac addiction, which is fine. They never will. For me, it's a matter of how easy it is for me to organize and access those 1s and 0s that have become part of who I am. Make it reliable, easy to use and well, pretty, and I'm good to go.

Just don't lose my shit.