clock … watching time, the only true currency

(Updated a few times… see end of entry.)

At the tail end of last week, I found 45 minutes to wander around at Macworld. My one goal — beyond seeing the show — was to find a solid external hard drive, with at least a FireWire400 interface. So I picked up a ROCPRO 400 AV 3.5″ FireWire 400 External Hard Drive. Choice was based on what was available and seemed to be reasonably priced. I’ve waited long enough, so availability leading into the three-day weekend helped me pull the trigger.

Of course, it’s the last of those three days, and I started partitioning the drive over 30 minutes ago, and it doesn’t look like it will be done for another 45 minutes if the progress bar is to be believed. Argh. I’m simply using the Disk Utility software bundled with the Mac OS… maybe I should have looked around for something faster. But at least the process is in progress.

My steps are:

• Partition the drive. I want to back up both the 250GB internal from the iMac and the 80GB internal from the PowerBook, so one partition for each.
• Install Tiger on both partitions. I’ve been postponing the upgrade on both computers until I do a backup.
• Back up the laptop. Planning to use SuperDuper… which I’ve downloaded, but not yet installed or purchased.
• Upgrade to Tiger on the laptop. There are a few pieces of data on the laptop which are critical, but less disruptive to daily flow if I run into any glitches with that computer.
• Repeat last two steps for iMac. And then I can try and figure out what kind of schedule to do incremental backups on.

I will update this post when it’s all done, with any notable events or glitches. I am no longer optimistic that it will all be done today.

The only rule when all of this is done? Backing up must be mindlessly easy.

Update, Monday Jan 16, 8pm PT

Well, the laptop went well, although it took much longer than I envisioned, in large part because I asked SuperDuper to repair permissions before making the copy. But the laptop (on which I’m typing) is now running Tiger, and has been updated to 10.4.4, and the backup is complete and valid up until the OS upgrade.

The desktop is still in progress. It ran over 21 hours in the “Repair Permissions” segment of the process, so I finally stopped it, and set it to make the original backup… which looks like it will run at least overnight. I hope no longer.

Update, Wednesday Jan 18, 7:20pm PT

The desktop got stuck after only 600MB or so. I restarted and tried again. No dice. Got stuck in a similar place (by MB). The log portion of SuperDuper came in handy, as I emailed the details to the support address and, even before I’ve become a paying customer, I got a helpful response pointing out that the recent iTunes update for 10.3.9 (which I’m on, until I backup… Catch 22!) broke the “Repair permissions” function. That doesn’t explain why I still can’t successfully run the backup without that option, despite restarting a few times, and dumping the original partition and letting SuperDuper create one instead. I’ll try a few more things… but I’m certainly buying SuperDuper for the laptop.