A few years ago, when I was madly busy, I had a cathartic moment.
It was in my earlier days of photographing digitally and, to be honest, I never thought that anything truly bad could ever happen to my hard drive.
Call it the ignorance of youth or whatever, but I kept putting off making a backup of my disk for about 3 years.
I was using a Mac and Macs were reputed to be reliable. So what could possibly happen?
Somewhere there I could hear Murphy chuckling, but there were all these other things to do and achieve and, well, life was busy.
So the practical things like backing up my hard drive got put off so I could keep busy with the fun stuff.
Wind back to a cold winters day sometime during 2004.
I was sitting on my couch working on an image in a rather relaxed and laid back manner.
Grabbing the cup of tea on my side I didn’t quite catch the handle.
The resulting split seconds, as the tea slowly drew its arch towards my Mac, are ingrained in my brain as a slow-motion horror flick that made my heart stop beating.
My Mac wasn’t happy and I can still feel the cold sweat on my neck just thinking about it.
A lesson I learned a few years prior was useful here.
Back then I opened up my television after my cat peed in it.
I just wanted to know what a tele looks like inside and the tele didn’t work anymore, so I thought to satisfy my curiosity once and for all.
After washing down the tv with the garden hose, and having a good snoop around its innards, I put the tv in the garden shed to be taken to the dump.
Now wind forward a few months.
With the summer approaching I came across the tele again while looking for a spade.
Being curious again I plugged it in and – bingo – it went like a new one. This thing just couldn’t be killed.
This valuable experience helped me with my computer situation.
After the tea went into the Mac – and sloshed around a bit – I quickly pulled the battery and placed the dear thing on my underfloor heating to wait an agonising two weeks for it to dry out.
Long story short.
The thing started up, the hard drive worked and I managed to get all my valuable files onto a backup disk that I purchased during the days of waiting for the verdict.
Now bring in Carbon Copy Cloner software, which is a thing of beauty.
CCC will make a doddle of backing up your files.
It can do so many things that Apple’s ‚Time Machine‘ can’t that the full price of naught is – in my opinion – fully justified.
That’s right, $0 dollars if you are still on Snow Leopard (like me) or before, and you like to use the free 3.4.6 version.
Lion or Mountain Lion users pay in the range of NZ$38 bucks for the latest version (3.5.1) that is fully certified for the latest operating systems.
The really useful feature is CCC’s ability to make bootable backups, which Time Machine can’t.
You’ll appreciate the difference when you get a critical systems failure and can’t afford the days or weeks for it to get fixed.
So get a copy of CCC and spend an entertaining afternoon backing up your hard disk (or if you have a life do it over night while you sleep).
Then wake up in the morning feeling relaxed, cleansed and free of worries.
Feel relieved that – knowing in your mind and heart – your next cuppa won’t be quite as menacing as the one in my distant past.
(Download link: http://www.bombich.com/download.html)
