Sarah forwarded me an instant classic diagram, which I tried to reproduce here, but couldn’t, for Wordpress-related reasons I don’t understand. Look at the diagram if you want to understand any of the foregoing. I have experienced both in horrid detail and all its glory, respectively.
Our last dwelling in Toronto was, we believe, the last house in Toronto proper to have a septic tank. Being a nearly 100-year-old farmhouse, that might not come as a surprise, but being in Toronto, it shocked us. Sadly, we discovered a, let’s say, flow problem with the tank the hard way. It took too much time and too many of someone else’s dollars (another reason to rent in an expensive city) to fix that problem, but it was fixed long enough for us to push the image out of our minds of a sewage marsh at our front door. Of course, the septic tank connection was replaced with what we understand is an entirely illegal hookup to the city’s storm drain, but frankly, that was never our problem.
Backing up computer systems, though, is a pleasure. It is the primary reason I recommend Mac computers to my friends and family. (Really!) Mac OS X makes disaster recovery routine by minimizing down time when disaster strikes. I have yet to see a backup/restore utility on the Windows platform that allows me to resume working within 5 minutes after a serious hard disk failure. Yes: 5 minutes. At the risk of boring you with geeky details, the key point is that when I back up my computer to an external hard disk (USB or Firewire, it works the same), I make the backup “bootable”. This means that my computer can’t tell the difference between booting from its internal hard disk and an external one. What this really means is that since I have nightly backups, when my internal hard disk fails, I simply boot to the external disk, losing on average half a day’s work, then continue what I was doing. When I can take a suitable break, I survey the damage, either reformat or replace my internal hard disk, then (and this is my favourite part) back up the external hard disk to my shiny new internal hard disk. There is no “restore” in this scenario, only backup, and it’s just a question of which direction. I can even add a second external hard disk while my internal one is out of service and backup external disk 1 to external disk 2 so that I always have a backup to work from. It works beautifully for a few reasons: even a disaster means I can resume working in 5 minutes, I can keep working while I’m waiting to replace my failed disk, and it’s easy to move data onto the new disk when it’s ready. I can even just wait until the next nightly backup at around 1.00 AM. Let me emphasize that I have never seen a Windows backup/restore platform allow me such peace of mind. I used to lose on average two full days restoring from a backup on Windows, including buying the replacement hard disk, reinstalling the operating system and figuring out which files to restore and not to restore. Disaster recovery is routine with a Mac as long as you’re willing to pay about $250+ extra for an external hard disk and a copy of SuperDuper!
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