I have full-moon fever

Last day of classes tomorrow. Also, my birthday. Currently trying to finish a paper that was due in February. So... yeah.

You can get a 2TB drive for a lot less then that if you look.

Wait, Maul2, did you used to go by Janz?

Teague: No why? I have aaaaaaaalllways been maul/maul2

And shadow: less than $170 Canadian?

I suppose. Either way, this is the cheapest one I've been able to find. Typically it's like $150 just for 1TB or something ridiculous like that.

Happy birthday, Shad!

The client I'm working for just bought a stack of four 2 TB Mercury Elite firewire drives. I carried them from one closet to another the other day. Eight terabytes in my hands. I felt really, really old.

It's what I do.

Oh, and on the subject of hard drives? You get what you pay for. If you luck out and find a real bargain, bite the bullet and buy two of 'em. You don't have anything digital unless you have it twice.

Lemme tell you how paranoid I am with my data. I've got my laptop hard drive, yeah. Then I've got a 1T firewire drive that I copy all the good stuff to. And that's on top of the 750 GB USB drive I have wired up to my wireless base station for Time Machine. And all the stuff I really care about, I FTP to Dallas to store on my best friend's SAN.

I lost some shit I'd worked hard on one time due to a hard drive crash. I don't want that ever to happen again.

Happy (belated) Birthday Shadow!

On the topic of backing up: I currently have a small box that I carry around labeled "Time Machine," that contains an internal 3.5 inch hard drive and a lot of packing peanuts.

Let me back up (heh, heh...) a bit.  In August '07 I bought my first (and only...so far) Mac, a Macbook Pro with a 160GB drive (an MA896LL/A if you really want to know).  Some time later OS 10.5 came out with a new feature called Time Machine, essentially a backup utility.  I upgraded, and decided to go with an external 320 GB drive for backup.  I connected it via USB, using one of these.  If you don't have one, it's well worth it to have in your kit; their dead useful, and at the time I was thinking I'd upgrade the internal as well, and would need a way to clone the drive.  Anyway...

At the time I was working for the now all but gone Ritz Camera, and I would usually bring my Mac with me (can you see where this is going?).  So one fateful day in May last year I hit the "Backup Now" button, packed up my Mac, and went to work.  That night it was stolen as I was helping a customer.  If you've ever had a computer stolen (actually that was my second stolen computer now I think of it ), or even lost a wallet, phone, or hard drive (thankfully I've never lost any of those), then you know that sinking feeling you get (I know at least one member of these forums this has also happened to).

Fortunately I have a backup image of my old Mac in the form of that drive in that box, but until now (and for the immediate future) I can't afford what it would cost to replace it.

What is great, is that when that fateful day comes, I can restore my new machine to the same state as my old machine in a matter of hours.

Until then, I'll continue to cart around my little "Time Machine" in the hopes that one day I can bring my old machine back to life.

So, anyone got an old MacBook Pro lying around they want to donate to a good cause?