I'm spending most of my time this weekend backing up all of my files, settings and preferences. Wiping my trusty TiBook clean so I can ship it off to its new owner.
I'm still getting 3-5 weeks quoted as ship time for the new PowerBook. Meanwhile, I'm restoring everything to an old trusty Mac B&W 400Mhz G3.
While I've always trusted Retrospect in the past for our 'enterprise' backup in the old PRISCOMM and Wirestone days. Today, I'm playing with Apple's Backup program. Apple has taken a lot of heat because it only is available (free) to .Mac subscribers. It actually validates the program each time you load by checking to see if you have an iDisc. You can use it to back up your files to your .Mac iDisc storage space or to DVD/CD. I don't under why it doesn't offer the option to back up to a basic hard drive? It failed me three times to write to DVD. So I've got three $5 coasters on my desk. And I played swap CDs yesterday to back up just my Users folder — total 11 CDs. Not sure if its the drive or what. I was able to back up my applications folder on a single DVD. So its either the multiple DVD issue or the drive was just finicky, bad discs, who knows.
Overall, this .Mac and Backup can be justified just to back up the basics like Mail, Address Book, iCal (schedules/calendars), Internet Explorer settings (bookmarks etc.) to the iDisc — a remote backup disk on Apple's 'secure' servers. But to backup a 30gig drive remotely to those servers not only would take a few days, you'd have to pony up quite a few dollars for the extra space ($350 per gig). Right now I've got the 100mb it comes with.
This is my weekend. And the sad part is, I'm going to have to go through it all again when my new PowerBook arrives. More later…
