I used to never back up. Well, I'd throw some iTunes songs on a DVD every once in a while, but that's about it. Then, I started doing some pro audio work for friend's bands and figured it was time to get serious. My home computer, though, never really got the treatment. When I upgraded to Leopard, I reformatted an external drive for Time Machine, but I wanted to have something better, as a double-check on Time Machine. So, I did what I do for pro audio, which is to get a Firewire drive the exact size of my main drive, and use Super Duper! to mirror the drive every night, leaving the resulting drive bootable. A plain rsync won't work, for some reason; the drive gets duped, but isn't bootable.
So, last night, I made the mistake of putting an old CD-R with a sticker on it into my slot-loading iMac (my main computer). Now, Apple needs to abandon this god-forsaken idiotic design decision that is literally designed to play Russian roulette every time you stick a disc in. The one thing I will give Windows over Mac: when you put a disc in a Windows box, you have a 100% chance of getting back out (and a 99% chance that doing will result in a bootable computer). Well, this disc wouldn't mount and wouldn't eject. A reboot of my computer resulted in...nothing. Gray screen forever. FUCK YOU APPLE. Would it really have been so bad to have a button? A tray that sticks out? Ugh. So, now I have to take my iMac to the Apple store to pray to Jobs that they can get the CD out. Meanwhile, I've got work to do.
So, I grab my Macbook Pro that I use for Pro Audio, plug in my trusty firewire mirror drive, boot and...viola! It's like I never left? Thankfully, the only thing I've done on my computer today was check email and surf the web and since those things are, you know, still on the Internet, I'm back. I don't know how I'm going to sync things back up when I get my box back, but I am thanking GOD right now that I do nightly backups (and that I have another computer to fall back on). I guess when working from home, it's good to have a spare.