2006-06-10
Windows—As Apple and various writers have said, Windows runs just fine on my iMac. It's indistinguishable from any other Windows box. I don't expect to use it much, but later today my daughter will load Sims2 on it, so we'll be able to see how it works for real. (Is Sims2 for real?)
ImageIngester—I'm trying something new for ImageIngester: Listing potential new features so I can get some feedback before I cut the code. You can take a look at the new page here. [1-Nov-2023: Link no longer available.]
Backup—I've seen a bunch of forum posts and articles lately about backup, mostly I think because external FireWire and USB drives have gotten so cheap. I have 4 of them myself, including a 40GB USB device I bought at Target the other day for $110. But, unlike with floppies, tapes, CDs, and DVDs, which are what people who backed up used to use, the drives generally stay connected.
So, I ask, what level of protection does a plugged-in drive offer? Here's a short list of hazards it doesn't protect against: fire, water, electrical surge, and theft. It does protect against user error and hardware failure, which are certainly worth protecting against.
It's as if people are implementing the technology of backup—a second copy—while forgetting the purpose of backup.
You might think that online backup is the perfect answer, but if you run the numbers you'll see it doesn't work. With my DSL upload speed of about 40K bytes/sec, it takes about 7 hrs/GB, so figure about 180 days to upload my 600 GB. Yup... 6 months of continuous upload, and that's assuming I don't use the connection for anything else for half a year. So, online backup works only for a critical subset, not for the whole thing.
One of these days I'll write a much longer article about how to design a practical backup system. I use a combination of connected drives, disconnected drives stored in a bedroom closet, disconnected drives stored in a fireproof media safe, online backup (my own web site, Apple's .Mac, and Amazon's S3), CDs, and DVDs. It's safe enough, but it's chaotic. I wish I had something more automated.