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I backup my iBook once a month or so to an
external Hard Disk. The 40GB Drive inside my iBook has always worried me, after
reading the how-to’s on
replacing the (very well hidden)
Hard Drive in the dual-usb models I really didn’t want anything to go wrong with
an already second-user laptop. Well, last night I did my monthly backup (notice
to other Tiger users Carbon Copy Cloner
works on 10.4 now!) using Mike Bombich’s *snigger* freeware tool “Carbon Copy
Cloner“, this little app takes advantage of a few UNIX tricks that
will clone your hard-disk contents to whatever external medium you want (iPod
even), the beauty of cloning - a built-in feature of any Apple
Application - is that you can clone a bootable copy of any disk… the “forks
are preserved” and so I can boot from an iPod or External Hard Disk as if I were
loading up from the hard disk inside my
Mac.But I’m not booting from the hard
disk in my mac, because around 2AM this morning - while watching an episode of
Ghost in The Shell - my iBook’s internal hard disk broke. Lucky I made that
backup, eh? Well, it gives me a reason to upgrade (to 60GB
at 5400RPM) and have a look inside my iBook. I can’t say the timing is
good - I’m in the middle of designing a website for work, it’s all safe on the
server, but I don’t have the portability to edit on my ‘commute’ to the office
in Elgin (something that may have led - with its bumps and bashes - to the
demise of the current drive). I’ll make do - I have a Dell for backup, battery
life of 30mins, woo!Oh - if you’re in
the market for a new laptop hard disk, looks like Fujitsu
are the way to go… apparently making the disk ’silent’ is high on their
priority list, theirs and mine.