Another mac bites the dust
Maybe it’s my lifestyle, maybe it’s bad luck, maybe it’s bad quality. Whatever it is the result is the same: 2 months after my last crash my mac went down again, losing one week of data and a day of work in the process.
I am now again faced with the decision to go with better hardware - like a ThinkPad - and realized one thing: I am locked into macs! Not only because I like the interface better, or because I think OSx is safer than XP. I am locked because I have Time Machine backups, and like iTunes files can be played only on iPods, Time Machine backups can only be restored on macs.
Buy a PC, lose all your data. Steve Jobs was - again - a step ahead of me. But now I am warned.
March 21st, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Dude - you need one of those little passport external drives to hold your time machine backups even when you’re on the move.
Anyway, I am writing this fom a Macbook Ai with a very dodgy ‘r’ key as you might be able to tell ;-) But who caes about one little letter when it looks so nice!
March 21st, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Il est temps de passer au pinguin ;-)
Flyback is the linux clone of time machine: http://flyback-project.org/ and the benefit is that it doesn’t rely on a proprietary format (it uses sqlite and rsync basically).
March 21st, 2008 at 11:17 pm
I made the shift from XP to Ubuntu Linux one year ago on my X60s Thinkpad and never looked back. I had the 50% of same lock in issues you had. Music I accepted that I needed windows on a virtual machine which is easy. Re backups, I use Amazon S3/Jungledisk. You can access that from any OS.
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:31 am
Time Machine backups aren’t any more closed than backups of any platform. As John Siracusa describes (look at the section “Time Machine Internals), your backups are just standard folders, and given a utility that can mount an HFS+ disk (the hfsplus kernel module on Linux, or products like MacDrive on Windows), all your data should be easily accessible. (The one possible drawback is that Time Machine uses special hard links for directories, but I’m assuming that the HFS+ implementations for Windows and Linux can deal with it.)
Obviously, if you have data that’s app-specific, you’ll need that app to read it, but that’s as much a problem with Windows applications as it is with ones on Mac OS X. (It’s far, far less of a problem with Linux, admittedly.)
Also, you say in passing that “iTunes files can be played only on iPods”. That’s true of iTunes Music Store purchases, but not of songs ripped by iTunes (which uses either MP3 or AAC, both of which are used by other applications and players).
Yoan: While Flyback sounds interesting, it’s arguably less open than Time Machine- SQLite is very free, but you still need it to read the backup; Apple’s solution just needs filesystem access.
March 22nd, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I think I need to try Linux for good. But where can I get a pre-installed machine?
Lee: I’m not very comfortable with having all my data in a small, portable and therefore easy to lose device. That’s why I only keep my hard drive at home, maybe until portable drives can be encoded, and you should be thankful I don’t wander around town with those pictures of you I took at the LIFT fondue ;)
Paul: I can access my folders yes, but it’s like on an iPod, files are organized in a way that prevents me from restoring them easily. I don’t have a my documents folder, it is spread all over the hard drive and there is no easy way to bring my files back. I should restore on a mac, then copy to another system.
March 31st, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Welcome to the wonderful locked world of Apple…
How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong: http://tinyurl.com/yoekso
My strategy: using SaaS as often as possible…maybe not yet so flexible as desktop apps, but it will probably minimize the potential loss of your data…