Thinkcorps

• just signed lease for office space. SMITH west coast is go! #

• Why can’t Poynter, so-called defender of journalism, give proper credit for six-word memoirs? Dubner did it. http://tinyurl.com/3l58j8 #

• phone’s getting no service. stupid att #

• Stephen Dubner on Good Morning America, talking up our book! The Dub rocks! http://tinyurl.com/64jd6g #

• twittering while cbs tapes a segment about our book with larry and rachel. they look so cute #

Our book finally goes on sale today. The site is humming with new signups and the book ranking has jumped up above #600 at Amazon. Yes, Amazon computes its rankings hourly, but so what? It’s still cool.

If you are so inclined, It makes a great gift.

Friday night, I screwed up a project’s subversion repository (note: I don’t think subversion really works on your local client, too tempting to overwrite files via the OS, which I’ve done countless times. D’oh.). In the process of trying to recover those files, I noticed my backup hadn’t run in two weeks. Yikes. I reset the backup scheduler, fixed my project, and decided to quit for the day.

Later that night, a bit after 10pm, I went to check something on my computer, and it froze up. I restarted and got a blank screen. I fiddled a bit, got it booted off the install CD, and tried Disk Utility. It said I had a b-tree error, but it couldn’t fix it. The next morning, I couldn’t find the drive at all. It was 100% and totally dead.

Did I mention that I have a book coming out and will be traveling next week?

So, I was freaking out, even though the Macbook is still under warranty (4 months old). But I got a lot calmer after realizing that my backup had successfully run Friday night, before the hard drive went belly up.

The funny thing is, most backup solutions are built around the limitations inherent in copying a lot of files. But that’s exactly the wrong approach. What people care about is the “restore.” Nobody cares about a backup until something goes wrong, at which point that backup should be as easy to use as possible. No weird archive formats, no software to install. Just my files please.

Thanks to a tip from my friend Ted, I invested in a $28 copy of SuperDuper and a 500 GB external firewire drive ($200). I partitioned the external into two drives, one which was the same size as my Macbook’s hard drive. Then I scheduled SuperDuper to run every night during the week.

What that meant, is that when my hard drive died, I had a perfect clone that I could boot from (because of the firewire). So, I could do everything normally, just by holding down the option key on startup, and selecting the firewire drive as the startup disk.

After Apple installed my new hard drive, I came home, restared off the clone disk, and ran SuperDuper to backup the clone to my new drive. With SuperDuper, backing up IS restoring. Pretty sweet. One click, same process, no muss, no fuss.

It took a while to finish copying all those gigs, and I was a little drained emotionally, but SuperDuper saved my bacon. Thank you.