Day 12 - Updates & Backups

A couple of days ago I got a message telling me there were software updates available. I was busy at the time so I just told it to go away however today I opened up the Apple menu to see what it was on about.

There were a good number of updates available, the most noteable being OS X 10.4.8 (my MacBook came with 10.4.6 installed). As I say, there were other things but that little upgrade was 300mb of download all on its own and even with broadband, that was a lengthy job. It set me thinking about backups.

The chapter about backups in my newly acquired 'rough guide' book started out by saying that the only way to make sure you don't miss anything is to back up the whole hard drive, but quickly moved on to suggesting that a more efficient strategy might be to just back up the user directory. This should cover 'personal data' but may well miss things like application settings, toolbar preferences and such. If efficient use of backup media is yout goal however, the down side of this strategy is that if you've loaded even a part of your CD collection into iTunes you're going to be backing up a whole bunch of stuff that you already have 'backup up' on the original CDs. With a little more selectivity we could ignore the music that we have on CD, burn CDs of music we've downloaded, photo's, and other things that we are likely to want to keep for a long time, and copy files with a shorter lifespan to a USB pen. This strategy would make it feasible to use a combination of CD burning and USB memory pens but it takes more organising (which probably means it won't get done as often as it should) and it does nothing to address the issue of software updates.

At 12 days out of the box, my machine has probably spent more time since its manufacture sitting on shelves in warehouses, so it's probably fair to say that there were more updates available at this point than I am likely to see again for a while. However, should I need to start again from scratch for any reason, it's a big ol' chunk of work that'll have to be done again, and it's only going to get worse as time goes on an more updates are released.

I wondered if there was a way to isolate the downloaded files such that I could burn them onto CDs and keep them with the CDs that came with the machine, but I can't find any information about that. In fact it seems kinda difficult to find anything at Apple amongst the tasters and blurb about Leopard (originally schedulled for 2006 but now schedulled for Spring 2007). A little searching around the web told me that since the creation of OS X, Apple have released new versions every 12 to 18 months with an upgrade usually costing around £80. So, there we have a solution: just buy the upgrade every 12 to 18 months and you need not worry about having an ever increasing number of updates to track down an install should your hard drive decide it's had enough.

On the other hand, and bearing in mind that a) I just bought the MacBook as a replacement for a 7 year old PC running Win98, b) buying and installing new operating systems is not my idea of fun, and c) I'm as poor as a church mouse who just got an enormous tax bill on the very same day that his wife left him and took all the cheese, I can't see that happening.

In reality anybody who puts music and photos (never mind video), on their Mac is going to find that the amount of space needed to backup the user directory pretty much rules out burning the stuff to a CD, uploading to a web server, or using a USB memory pen. To do the job properly were talking external drives here and the good news is that an external drive big enough to back up the whole of the MacBook's hard drive several times over can be purchased for less than the likely cost of upgrading to Leopard.

I'm not rushing down to the shops just yet, but it is looking like my letter to Santa may well read like an advertisement for PC World. The irony is that I could really use a new pair of slippers.