Jun 11
The Drobo
Jan 25
For those of you who don’t know, I recently purchased a MacBook with 2GB of RAM. That’s right, I bought a Mac! In just three short days I’ve already learned a lot about OS X and I am actually starting to feel at home. I’m kind of suprised with how comfortable I already feel considering the fact that prior to this laptop my only experience with a Mac was at the Apple store and through everything I’ve read about OS X.
Here’s what I’ve done thus far with my new MacBook:
- Installed several apps including: Office, AppZapper, Taco HTML, VLC, Software for my printer, Firefox and several other applications. Installing software on the Mac is great. No longer do I have to worry about the Windows registry
- Setup my email and several other applications including iChat so that I can communicate with the rest of the world. iChat is pretty sweet but I’m not sure how much I am actually going to use it.
- Connected my camera and a usb thumb drive just to see how well OS X handles other USB devices. Needless to say it worked like a champ.
- Played around with the entire iLife suite including GarageBand and iDVD. I think I might put together a DVD for Alex’s two year.
- Played around with most of the System preferences
- Got connected up to my network. This was the easiest wireless connection I’ve ever made. In fact, I was able to connect directly to the network during the initial setup once I remembered that I had to add my MacBook’s MAC address to my Linksys router (check out my video).
The only complaint I have thus far is in regards to the lack of a two button mouse. As you can imagine, trying to right click with a one button mouse is kind of difficult. Every once and a while I plug in a good old two button mouse just so I don’t have to screw around with the ctrl key. Anybody know why Apple insists on going with a one button mouse? It just seems like it is extremely inefficient to be using only one button. In any case, here’s a video that I took while I unboxed my MacBook. Stay tuned for more Mac/Apple info. I plan on updating this blog often with more informatio on how the switch is going.
Dec 27
One of my biggest fears is that I will some how loose all the pictures that I’ve taken over the past six years. Many of these pictures are irreplaceable. Like pictures from the birth of my son or pictures from when my wife and I went to Europe. Needless to say, I’d feel horrible if I lost even one picture from my collection. With that being said, I’ve been pretty good about backing things up. In the past I would backup my pictures to an external USB drive. I would also backup to a DVD at the end of each year. Both of these backup techniques have a number of shortfalls. My external hard drive wouldn’t save me if I were to have a fire in my house or if my computer were some how damaged. My DVD backup system was a little better in that I stored offsite at my parents however, backing up to a DVD is a lengthy process which requires me to be proactive. Needless to say, months would go by without me backing up to the DVD simply because I would forget.
Recently my hosting company increased my storage capacity to 55 Gigabytes at the same time, they also increased my bandwidth to 999 Gigabytes of transfer per month. Being the big geek that I am, I immediately saw this as an opportunity for me to backup my pictures to a remote location which is hopefully better protected from power failures and fires then my computer. With the help of SyncBackSE, I now have a safe and secure backup of all 23 GBs of my pictures. SyncBack is great because it allows me to schedule ftp backups while I’m asleep. I currently have Syncback setup so that it copies any new pictures to my hosting account at 1 AM est. It took me nearly a week to get everything transferred (due to my internet connection dropping and slow upload speeds) but now things are going smooth. I really think this process will work out great for me. I’m still backing up to my external hard drive as well as the DVDs but, now I’m not as worried tha I will somehow loose all of my precious data.
PS: In case you can’t tell, I would highly recommend SyncBack to just about anybody. The software has some many features that it makes a geek like me smile. If you’re a cheapskate and you don’t want to spend $25 for the full version, you can even download a copy of the free version which includes most of the features found in the $25 version.
How do you backup your precious data?