Almost bought a MacBook Pro

I have been concerned about the possibility of my daughter losing her MB Pro, and was thinking of getting a similar model as a kind of reserve, but it would have cost NOK 17.5K, which is a hell of a lot of money under the circumstances..

Instead I ordered a 1TB WD external drive, and we'll take a SuperDuper clone before she leaves for the East again this weekend.

Not sure if we would be able to run from this clone on my New iMac, which runs either Lion or Mountain Lion, but we'll check it out. If it works, at least she has the opportunity to work while waiting for a replacement.

Trials and tribulations as they say

Not sure if I mentioned the work done and time spent in front of the PC, but Gentoo copies have gone and now there is quite a snazzy uptodate OpenSUSE in their place! I ended up with back pain of course..

Then there has been the search for a better backup app than TI 9 (and 11 which is being returned) which only want to backup the Linux drive at very slow, full disk (298GB) only. No way or space!

I came across Paragon Drive Backup 9 Personal, a fairly new release, but I think they forgot to update the Recovery CD options.. their Bart PE plugin solution is not a solution! Its too complicated for the average guy to do, and it doesn't work. I spent days on it :( Their Recovery CD loads OK, BUT the Normal mode reaches a blue Paragon screen with nothing on it.. Failsafe mode works, but the mouse drive is from 1995 and only works for me if I wiggle it during all activities... laughable, but it came in useful when I tried another app ShadowProtect and ended up screwings Windows - finger trouble ;) - and restored a 4th July archive.  had bought it by then btw.

Next on the list was the Lifehacker tip, Macrium Reflect Free. I downloaded it and managed to backup XP to the F partition on hdb, check the Bart PE Recovery CD worked - the Linux CD hangs at the firewire drive section - and then thunder stopped play, both for me and for my recording of the Williams sisters battling out at Wimbledon. Happy to say Venus won! I don't like the look of Serena, or perhaps its the name, or both.

Thats it for now.. looks like I'll end up with three Backup apps!

Passport ordered!

After quite a bit of research both in Discussions and WD's support site, I bit the bullet and ordered the 320GB Passport USB drive. It's a shiny black but quite neat..

So there will be quite a hierarchy of storage available, from the 500GB NAS access point Time Capsule, the firewire drives, and now the portable Passport..

So far so good

12:30 pm

Have just finished making a clone of the AIR drive to MB 3 (now AIR clone) using the AIR's Disk utility, and although the destination partition was smaller, all went well, and I booted up AIR clone to prove it.. now that I know it works, I'll try using SuperDuper!. This should be a simple method of restoring to the AIR drive.

NB! When I plugged the USB drive in Time Machine sprang into life asking to use it! So, one didn't need the NAS Access point after all...