On a day like any other, I flip open my sleeping Mac Book Pro and find myself waiting for the unlock dialog.  And waiting.  And waiting.  And it eventually dawns on me that the laptop is not busy looking for attached hardware but it is busy deciding to never present the log in dialog to me.  I can tell its is still running – it makes the proper beeps as I press keys and I can hear the fans and drive whirring away if I press my ear to the case.  But, I can’t see what it’s doing (or not doing).

Turns out the video stopped working, which requires shipping the machine to Apple for replacement and creates the dilemma of what to do without a machine for a few days and what happens to my data while the machine is in someone else’s hands.  Let’s break down the problem:

1. What if the drive is replaced/lost/damaged during this process? I’m not worried about this.  I use the OS X Time Machine feature for backups, which copies changed files hourly so the most I lost is what happened in the past 60 minutes.  I generate a lot of files through Email and word processing, but not so much I’d lose too much since most of that is actually on a server and I wasn’t in a real active period while this happened.
2. What if someone else looks at my data? Another area I’m not worried about.  I use encrypted disk images that are mounted while I’m logged into the system.  If I’m not logged in, plus use a separate mount command with different passwords, my data is just a big lump of bits.  I have several images I use for different categories of work, and I mount them and dismount them depending on what I am doing.  I prefer this over the File Vault encryption of the whole hard drive, since I don’t want to waste time or cycles encrypting things like scratch files and iTunes.
3. What do I do while my machine is in the shop? Aah, here’s a problem.  Fortunately, our IT department keeps a few machines available for just such an emergency.  So they gave me a spare Mac Book.

Problem: the Mac Book has no Firewire port, so no way to connect by backup drive.   So, they changed it for a Mac Book Pro (although I really liked the 13 inch form of the Mac Book).

Problem 2: The Mac Book Pro spare had a 120 G drive, mine had a 160 G drive.  And yes, I filled it passed 120 G.  So, I needed to do some trimming.

As discussed in an earlier post, booting up OS X in “Firewire Mode” helps tremendously.  You can boot up in this mode without seeing the video, and it allows you to see and copy the drive image as needed over Firewire.  From the spare I started copying off data that didn’t need to go to the spare machine.  iTunes files (30G, bah) were copied to an external USB drive.  Photos as well.  A few other random personal things and I got the total size down to the point where I could transfer to the loaner with 5G or so left over.

The spare machine was now a functional copy of my machine, and my machine was shipped off to Apple Care with a promise of 7 business days to be returned.  It actually came back in 5.

I made sure to be careful about what I was creating on the spare machine, so copying over work that was done on the space was easy, and done with a USB thumb drive.  These are the world’s most useful things to keep around in the 2G or more variety; much easier than figuring out how to do it machine to machine or to a server.

I’ve outpaced what I can back up on my original Accodata 160 G external Firewire drive, and went looking for a replacement.  I didn’t have a specific brand or model I was looking for since the Accodata drive, which I had never heard of, has given good, reliable performance for more than 4 years.  The only thing I cared about was Firewire and at least 500G storage.  I have done enough side-by-side use between the Firewire drive and a USB 2 drive to know that I’m not going to waste any time on a USB drive for important things.

WD MyBook 1 TB (on the left)

Western Digital has a series of drives called “My Book” in various sizes and interface options. They are all in a similar case, roughly the height of a paperback book in different widths depending on the drive capacity.  Best Buy had one on sale of interest, which I purchased on the web for in-store pickup.  It ended up being a minor debacle due to the product code on the web site not matching the product code of the product on the shelf.  And, of course the one I purchased wasn’t in stock.  So, the quick calculation showed that it wasn’t worth my time to come back or go to another store and I purchased a larger capacity drive with the same interfaces.  This is a 1TB My Book with Firewire 400, eSATA, and USB 2.0 interfaces.

There is not much to tell about installation.  You plug the drive in, and the operating system sees it and makes it available.  The only thing I did for preparation is to reformat the drive to use OS X native formatting.  The cross-platform FAT-32 formatting the drive comes with was not of interest since I’ll only ever plug the drive into my main iMac.  It’s use will be for backup – currently using the Apple Backup utility but migrating to Time Machine when I get some time to set that up.

The drive is fast – transfers are very quick – and 1TB is the most amazing amount of space anyone will ever need (until about 3 or 4 years from now, the standard disclaimer for any drive purchase).  The drive also has a very sexy LED display on the front that shows you the relative amount of space used (fills up like a thermometer), and the display does a lot of dancing and chasing when there is data transfers in progress.

My only complaint is that there seems to be some unknown dependency of actions to recognize the drive.  The drive is not recognized on power up/down sometimes.  There seems to be a specific sequence of power up drive – wait for ready light – power up computer to get the drive recognized.  And, the drive does not seem to enter power-down-state when turning off the computer.  However, I should upgrade OS X from Tiger to Leopard to determine if this is a drive issue or the OS.