What I miss
Okay, I have been in Cairo for three weeks now and the thing that I miss the most is downright nerdy: the security of a good hard drive backup. I have been running regular backups with CarbonCopyCloner (free) ever since I lost a month of course work two years ago. When Leopard came out I started using Time Machine as my default solution. (I may be dead wrong, but I don’t feel like I need a bootable backup at all times.)
When I left for Cairo, I chose to leave both my regular external hard drive and my portable one behind. That was a bad decision. It isn’t that I have experienced any problems, it is the nagging feeling that I am stupidly tempting fate. I didn’t think I would, but I also really miss the safety net that Time Machine offered me. I (actually) cringed today before I emptied my trash bin.
Thankfully, there are solutions for (OCD) people like me. One excellent online backup utility that I am now using is Mozy. It installs an app that shows up in the menubar and backs up 2 gigs of data to their servers. You can tell it to backup address book contacts, keychains, bookmarks, and custom folders. You can set it to refresh the backup automatically every day and force it to refresh it more frequently. While 2 gigs is not much, it is more than enough to backup my daily work.
With backups out of the way, I can go to bed. Night.
