I was reading Lifehacker one morning a few days ago and came to realize that my "backup strategy" for my iBook was not as robust as it could be. I can copy my data to my external USB hard drive . . . but if something should ever happen to my iBook's hard drive (e.g. power failure? botched effort to repartition prior to an Ubuntu install??), it's not like my old PowerPC iBook will allow me to boot up over the USB port. No, I'd be forced to reinstall my OS from scratch, then reinstall all my apps, and only then would I be able to restore my data. Older PowerPC iBooks can only boot up over drives connected via Firewire.
It was time to find a new external hard drive that used Firewire (aka 1394). Microcenter, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc. -- all of them disappointed me.
The overwhelming majority of external drives were only USB, and the one or two exceptions with Firewire were outrageously expensive presumably because they had larger storage capacities. I even kicked around the idea of purchasing one of those "DIY" hard drive enclosure kits with Firewire ports and adding a smaller/less costly hard drive myself. No go there either, because the only enclosure kit I could find with Firewire on the shelves was over $50 from MacAlly.
That's when I decided I was going to purchase my next backup solution online.
Would you believe even trying to find a good deal with Froogle was complicated? No matter what search terms I used, it seemed impossible to separate the external hard drive results from the external enclosure kits. If I found something that looked promising, I'd click through the reseller link and find that the item was either no longer available or some kind of "mix up." After several hours of searching off and on, I finally wound up settling for a 160 GB IDE hard drive and a halfway decent "Metal Gear" drive enclosure.
I think I managed to get a good deal on this buy, because when I do a search for comparably priced external hard drives, the storage sizes are all coming up as 120 GB.
But wait . . . there's more!
The irony of all this is that some of the folks in my organization's IT department have suddenly decided they are unhappy with the weekly backup process we jointly came up with five months ago. Go figure-- first they say that backing up the data on the web servers isn't in their realm of capability or responsibility. Then, after you sit down and work out the details of how you can take up that responsibility, they come back several months later and tell you that you are not permitted to do it that way any more.
Typical. (rolls eyes)
The good news, however, is that once I get my new personal backup solution up and running at home, I can redeploy my old external USB drive as my new backup alternative solution at work.