why I feel warm and fuzzy. (at least one of the reasons)

until leopard came around my backup strategy looked like this: a small script grabbed everything I considered important, zipped it into one file and copied that one to a nas drive. it might not look very sophisticated, but it just worked and made me feel safe enough. why would I ever need a third party tool?

with leopard came time machine and knowing that there is a backup tool built right into the os, that actually does both, backup my whole system and incrementally save changes, made me wonder… so what was next? right, I went out and bought a big external hdd…

a couple of months went by, I abandoned my own ‘backup solution’ and put all of my trust into time machine… and it didn’t fail me. I woke up before sunrise, made coffee, thought about the big questions of our existence in the shower and found all the answers while shaving. so once I had finished my morning hygiene procedure, I went to my computer in order to write down my magnificent insights. but the stupid thing was locked up, frozen, it died… after some time rebooting and doing the system tests I figured that my hdd had passed away…

it could have easily been a really, really bad day. but it wasn’t! I went out, bought a new drive, put it in (no big problem with a macbook), started from the leopard dvd and restored my system. done. it just worked. I can’t begin to describe how warm and fuzzy I felt that day… (needless to say, that once everthing was back to normal, I totally forgot what the big answers were. what a shame!)

and today it happened again, no, my hdd didn’t fail and unfurtunately I also didn’t find the answers again, but a couple of days ago I deleted an untitled folder (’cause hey – no title, can’t be important, right?) yeah, wrong: as it turns out, there actually was something important (and even titled!) in there… so I started up the time machine, traveled back to 1955 and made my mother fall in love with me instead of my dad. consequently I was never conceived and/or born and therefore could never delete the folder… oh wait, that’s the other time machine… the one that comes with os x just restored the file, granted, less cool from a physics-of-time-travel-perspective, but also way less morally questionable… and it totally made me feel warm and fuzzy, again.

so dearest reader, now you know why I feel warm and fuzzy, but what I actually was trying to say: backup! it’s worth it. (oh, and get a mac.)