Comments on: Otherwise occupied

By: MarkGisleson

MarkGisleson — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:28:25 +0000

LaCie’s Porsche firewire drives are very nice. compact, and actually look nice. Great for music, movies, etc.

By: Iamhbomb

Iamhbomb — Fri, 16 May 2008 03:59:00 +0000

Other people have had good suggestions on what to get for a backup drive (I have a couple of LaCie drivesand a Maxtor that have been great). I have a non-rec for you. Please don’t get the Maxtor One Touch USB drive, what ever you do. I know about how long it should take to copy my files onto a drive (alright, I’m a bit obsessive about having multiple backups – I keep one at work in case something bad happens to all the ones at home), grabbed all of my music files and dragged it over to the One Touch. I figured it would take about 4 hours at most. Well, 49 hours later, it finally finished. Holy crap… Anyway, I ended up taking the drive out of the case and putting it into an Acomadata external case and now it works like it ought to.

By: nfgusedautoparts

nfgusedautoparts — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:05:47 +0000

I am using a LaCie d2 Quadra (500Gb) on my powerbook G4. It is working quite well. I’m using it on a Firewire 800 port, but it also supports USB, Firewire 400, and Serial ATA. Firewire 800 is the fastest port available on the G4 Powerbook. If my mac did external Serial ATA, that’d be the way to go.
Hints: this type of drive does tend to suffer a little bit of infant mortality; don’t depend on it until it’s made it through it’s first month of service. If you look at the reviews on Newegg, all the bad reviews are from folks who got one that died days or weeks after purchase; if it lasts longer than that it’ll last a long time. Most drives from most vendors in this category will probably be about the same in this regard.
For backups, Time Machine in OX X Leopard really works. Divide the drive into two partitions, maybe one of 200Gb for time capsule and another for extra files. Just run time capsule while you’re burning in the new drive; once it’s survived its first month you can start taking the other partition seriously.

By: Synoia

Synoia — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:57:02 +0000

0. Get whatever data you need off the PC Laptop.
1. Re image the PC. You can’t win again the viruses & spy ware, nor can you ever know you got them all (That’s Microsoft’s professional advice). You might try Ubuntu instead of Windowze.
2. 1 TByte Network storage box. They are cheap. Netgear make one, looks like a toaster.

By: JoFish

JoFish — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:01:40 +0000

The Western Digital Studio II is a pretty nice drive, I think a 1TB (2 drives) model is around $300 bucks. Provides RAID (mirroring) and is pretty fast. Has a ton of connections USB, Firewire, e-SATA and isn’t too bad looking. Also has no fan and is very “green” since it goes to sleep and stays cool with out using extra power for cooling. You can use it as is and get 1TB of storage or choose the RAID option when you set it up and get less space, but peace of mind from data redundancy. my 2¢ worth of info. Biggest drawback: not very portable at all, it’s large.

Need help battling virii (besides San Diego republicans) drop me a line…

By: WeirdDave

WeirdDave — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:26:07 +0000

What jnfr said.

Ad-Aware http://www.lavasoftusa.com/pro.....e_free.php and Spybot Search and Destroy http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html to clean the machine (the latest Spybot has a nice inoculation feature. Nothing changes your system registry without your permission).
AVG http://free.grisoft.com/ for free anti-virus and Zone Alarm http://www.zonealarm.com/store.....nloads.jsp or Sygate http://www.filehippo.com/downl....._firewall/ for a firewall.
That should keep your non-Mac happy (a lot of that stuff runs on Macs too).

And speaking of being geek, has anyone (uh, running Windows) dared to install XP SP3 yet?

By: xpurg8d

xpurg8d — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:54:17 +0000

The Time Capsule is great. I have the 1TB model and it just sits there quietly doing it’s job so I don’t have to think about it. What’s different about Time Capsule over “just another” external hard drive is it’s an excellent wifi station (so, for example, when the L&T Casey is home from school she can use her laptop from anywhere in your house or yard through a wifi network you’ve set up and, of course, locked to exclude unwanted visitors). When Mrs. Tbogg gets her MacAir she’ll be able to do the same.

By: captphealy

captphealy — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:35:20 +0000

Backup? Try the Time Capsule, Apple’s new hard drive with built-in wifi. Although it’s made specifically to interface with the new Mac backup system Time Machine, it’s supposed to work with other systems, too.

By: Blue

Blue — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:31:47 +0000

Can’t go wrong with LaCie drives and oo la la there is a French connection to piss off a favored demographic.

By: baldheadeddork

baldheadeddork — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:01:57 +0000

Hey T -

I’ve had the best luck with Western Digital for ATA/SATA desktop drives like you’ll use for an external drive.

You can use almost any external hard drive with a Mac. All of the WD external drives can be used with Mac OS-X, but the base models will have to be reformatted for the Mac OS. If you don’t want to be bothered, the WD My Book Studio comes pre-formatted for Mac. Right now the 500GB Studio model is on sale through WD’s site for $149 - that’s a pretty good price for a Mac formatted drive.