Monday, March 03, 2008

new mac, old mac

When Sarah got her dad's Mac, I was bequeathed with her old Mac, a G4 iMac. I have enjoyed putting it to good use. One thing I've had to do is start backing up her files off the computer so I can use the hard drive space for the Netflix prize contest.

This got me thinking about backups. I am using the poor man's backup, the DVD, but I would like to be able to easily back up my PC and Mac, preventing the destruction of about ten years' worth of personal data. A lot of it is crap like shareware I installed, but a good chunk of it is stuff that is creative, or personal history, or both.

I think I need to look into off-site backups for this data. If anyone has a reliable option, please let me know.

Meanwhile, I am rereading my machine learning texts, trying to get back to where I was a year or so ago, in the thick of graduate school, just coming off a data mining course.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

For backup on my work laptop (G4 Powerbook with OS X 10.3.9) I bought an external disk (500G firewire HD which is a bit of overkill for my 160G laptop drive). It was cheap. Because the software with the drive did not work on 10.3.9, I downloaded PsyncX shareware. Works great.

At home I have been using Personal Backup from Intego software. It is brilliant. I got it because I like their Internet Content Barrier program. I assume that Time Machine with OS X 10.5 works even better.

Anonymous said...

Oops. Your looking for offsite backup. I have a backup disk at home and at work. I have my work laptop backed-up on both. That leaves my home computer at risk True, true.

Obviously, .Mac has the $100/year backup. I assume Google has something. But I have no experience with this stuff.