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Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

backup

Yes. Another Backup Lecture.

Daring Fireball: An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox

Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

John's article, advice, and success story about doing smart backup is exactly the reminder that a lot of people need to hear right this second. Because, it's impossible to overstate the importance of automated, redundant, and rotated backups. Trust me. You will need them all. Soon. Repeatedly. Forever. Always.

Worst of all, every stupid cliche about backup that currently makes you roll your eyes in exasperation will be visited upon you tenfold if you're not using some flavor of the anal-retentive system nerds like John and I live by.

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jwz: Classic backup advice

jwz - PSA: backups

This forum question about a comment I made on the most recent MacBreak Weekly reminds me that I mention jwz's advice on backup often enough that it's worth reposting the URL (as well as making sure credit goes where it's due). On the one hand, his advice could hardly be simpler (that's one reason I like it), but how many of us have taken the time to put a mature backup regime in place?

If you value your data, can't tolerate downtime, and are casting about for a thorough solution, consider giving this a try.

"OMG, three drives is so expensive! That sounds like a hassle!" Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.

 

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TOPICS: backup, hardware, jwz

A Tale of Disk Crashing Woe, and the Utilities That Saved Me

Apologies if I'm a little cranky, but I've suffered two hard drive crashes in as many weeks, and while I was able to recover somewhat gracefully, the aggravation of watching plodding status bars for hours on end while I wait for my data to load has been unbearable. Fortunately, my wife has employed Bobby Knight-proof safety features in our home office and chained everything to the desk, or else I would have chucked it all out the window.

But since I'm finally back online, I wanted to give a tip of the binder clip to three little programs that saved my bacon during these past two weeks, one crowd favorite and two lowly OS X utilities:

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