So I finally got around to getting an external hard drive for the MacBook, on the advice of the new MacIT dude. This guy was expensive, but he seemed to know what he was talking about and resolved some issues.
Still haven’t taken the iPad, which he diagnosed as defective, over to the Apple store. I’ve come to dread dealing with those folks, whose customer service seems to be going down the tubes. But need to do that: he thinks there’s an outside chance they may give me a new one! If so, he paid for himself in one sentence…
He suggested Western Digital’s “My Passport” drive. It’s reviewed pretty well, and he wasn’t the first IT type to recommend it. So I ordered one from Amazon while he was here in the office, to be sure I managed to actually get the right one. Price was reasonable — around $70. It arrived forthwith in the mail.
It’s amazingly fast: backed up the entire, vast hard drive — over 775,000 files — in an hour or two. And now, hallelujah brothers and sisters, I can use Time Machine on this computer.
IT Dude says you can disconnect it, go on about your business, and reconnect, at which point Time Machine will back up whatever you did while you were away. Very convenient. 🙂
Anyone use Arq with Amazon’s cloud or Google Drive? I’m not crazy about storing my data on someone else’s cloud, nor do I need yet another monthly bill. Admittedly, 60 bucks a year isn’t much…but it all adds up. Here a nick, there nick, every where a nick: before long what you have is a large gouge out of your budget.
Still now that I have Amazon Prime, I wonder if that would be worth looking into.
Another example of what an amazing time we live in. All that memory/storage for ….$70….is just crazy. I have had good luck at our Apple store BUT I took DD2 who “spoke their language” with me. We lucked out in that her computer hard drive went up and the Apple guy asked me if I had purchased the extended warranty when I bought the unit for her. To which I had no clue. He checked the records and I HAD bought the extended warranty. Sooo a $300 + repair bill was reduced to ….$0. AND was ready in about 3 hours….on a Saturday…. I’m with ya on the “cloud” rent….Might be $60 today but could be $600 in a year or two. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to charge for e-mail accounts. Just imagine the “income potential” at say $1 a month per e-mail account. Would sure look good on someone’s bottom line….
It is astonishing, isn’t it? Y’know, I came across my old Compaq Presario, the last PC to grace these halls before I switched over to Apple.
Out of curiosity, I plugged it in, and by golly, it came on!
Took a few minutes to remember how to work it… 😀
It has some stuff in it I could use for a new feature at Plain & Simple Press, but it doesn’t seem to have a USB port. And I don’t think it connects wirelessly to the Internet…or if it does, I don’t know how. It has a phone jack!!
It might be able to burn data to a CD…but the last time I tried to run an old CD in one of these Apple computers, it almost made the Mac ignite.
Jeez, don’t say that about MacMail! It could give those clowns down at the Apple Corporate HQ ideas…
The memory technology just amazes me. Many would say this “tech” killed Kodak…and I would tend to agree. Recently we went thru box after box of pictures for a “celebration of life” viewing. These pics were in envelopes with prices ranging from $7 to $10 per pack. And then we found some more recent pics on memory cards….which held a couple of thousand pics per…and the memory card cost around $10. No wonder Kodak went down. I have a couple of old HP’s that I need to get rid of….one approaching 14 years old that I still use for leases and correspondence. It’s amazing to me how far we have come…..
Man, that’s for sure! Just the COST of processing camera film — when maybe 10% or 15% of pictures came out halfway decent. And then what do you DO with all those fading photos?
You know, Kodak had a digital camera lo these many years ago whose software, which you could install on your computer, was _far_ superior to the iPhoto and to most other photo manipulating programs. You wonder what happened to those kinds of programs.
I’m not yet willing to pay for cloud storage just yet but in a former life had it through an employer. It was decent peace of mind having all those files stored where it didn’t require a proprietary piece of equipment to retrieve them. We were a multi-OS shop and it was worth something being able to access the data whether you were working on a Mac, PC, or Linux machine. I do also like it for the loss due to natural disaster aspect – an earthquake that trashes my laptop is quite likely to do the same for my external HD!
That’s the truth. I stash everything that’s REALLY crucial on DropBox, but the freebie access surely doesn’t hold all the data on the MacBook. Don’t you get space when you have Amazon Prime?
I have a WD My Cloud backup/external drive I purchased a few years ago when I had problem with my MacBook. I realized I wasn’t backing anything up, so I remedied that as soon as the MacBook was fixed. Time Machine runs on it every hour, and it is a 1 terabyte personal cloud storage device. I can access files from my smartphone and iPad by using the free app. I haven’t tried to access the files from another computer, though. I don’t really have any personal work I must keep, but it’s good to have that piece of mind about my photos and the few files I do need to keep.
I figure if/when (probably “when”) the Mac crashes, I’ll have to get a Mac Genius to unencrypt and reupload the data to a new computer or to the giant iMac. Plus I store some working files, such as data tracking clients and billing, on DropBox. It helps a lot in the peace of mind dept.