*looks at clock*

[kyburg]

Yup. Home with Mini in tow, and she's booting like a champ. However, whatever got corrupted on the hard drive could happen again, so I'll be looking for an outboard drive to begin doing complete backups on a regular basis - and keep the Applecare contract current.

I *heart* my Apple Store. Only thing they were missing were cookies.

Comments

[dracowayfarer.livejournal.com]

We have some decent deals on external HDs at work. Lemme know what you have in mind?

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Needs to be big enough to hold backups for at least four computers, USB 2.0 and suitable for use by both Win and Mac machines. Oh, and less than $300. Whaddya got?

[dracowayfarer.livejournal.com]

What kind of backups are we talking about? Do you have lots of music or videos? Or are we just talking about Sims saved games, Word docs and photos?

I was thinking about a couple of pocket-size USB HD's we have that are around $60-100 depending on the size you want (40GB or 100GB), but we also have a regular desktop sized 250GB external which would be better if you have a lot of large files or just a lot of info on your 4 machines.

You may already know this but you don't need to backup the entire HD, just files that you don't have copies of elsewhere. Anything that's re-installable (like programs that you could re-download or that came with the comp and are already on CDs) don't need to be included in your personal backups.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

I want the ability to do *complete* backups (yeah, even the program files) just on general principle, and then do incremental backups on a routine basis. On more than one machine, across more than one platform.

Yeah. BIG. Monster-like, big. And dead-reliable.

[dracowayfarer.livejournal.com]

The dual-platform issue shouldn't be a problem. I have yet to come across an external HD that wasn't both Windows and Mac compatible. Most are formatted in FAT, I think, which is readable by Mac OS computers (they can also read NTFS drives but can't write to them).

How big are your hard drives?

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Big enough. I plan to use Stuffit for the archival program, but I think they all are above 50GB, some likely more than that.

[dracowayfarer.livejournal.com]

If you're looking at possibly spending a couple hundred anyway, have you thought about getting an archival program? Some HD's come with them, as I think the 250GB drive we have does.

Also, back to backing up programs, while that's a fairly simple matter on the Mac OS, it's a lot trickier with Windows. Some programs install bits and pieces of themselves into the OS itself (Registry), and you can't backup all of Windows with Stuffit. At least not as far as I am aware.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

I *heart* Stuffit - it's cheap, it does everything I want it do, I can control it and all that jazz.

Windows, Mac - I keep it all and let God figure it out on the back end if it comes to that.

[dracowayfarer.livejournal.com]

Okay. I won't argue methods with you anymore. ;)

I don't think we have what you're looking for, though. Unless you think 250GB is enough for everything. We have larger drives, but those are internal.

[dracowayfarer.livejournal.com]

I stand corrected. We got these in this week.

What do you think? 320GB enough?

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

*drools* Oh yeaaaaaah. How much are they going for?

[dracowayfarer.livejournal.com]

They're $129 a pop. Still amazed at how much prices have dropped on HD's over the last year alone. That's less than $.50 per gigabyte - and that's for an external!