So, we came home this afternoon, after a shrink visit and an hour’s walk (a loop through downtown Menlo) to find that one of our hard drives had failed. It was kind of like coming out of the clinic yesterday and finding a flat tire on our car. So I’m digging through my box of old hard drives for a replacement – the dead drive is an aging 80 GB external drive that backs up my current ‘main machine,’ a Mac Mini (Intel chip) via Time Machine. The drive, an USB unit, is bigger in some dimensions than the Mini.
Rather than dig out some ancient, chugging drive (I can just see the steam hissing from the sides and coal smoke pouring out the top) it may be time to rethink data handling and backup strategies on the LAN. Local area network drives are cheap, and one of them, in current 500 GB or 1 TB flavors, would easily accommodate all the smaller drives on our LAN. The trick will be tailoring the right mix of backup products: Time Machine, Backup and Chronosync each have their strengths…
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