Ask the Macist

There's a great new column on the Laist blog called Ask the Macist. Here's the bio of its author:

About Chris Ullrich (aka the MACist): Chris is a frequent contributor to LAist
as well as other publications and also tweaks Macs (and PCs) for clients in the
Entertainment Industry.

Well, that's Entertainment Industry, capital E, capital I. But Ask the Macist is pretty darn good nonetheless. And since I need all the help I can get, I plan to mine it for all I can.

The first question, about running Windows programs on Macs, doesn't interest me because a) I don't have an Intel Mac, and b) I don't plan on getting one.

But the second question, on how to back up a Mac, is something that interests me greatly. Chris recommends one of those big Firewire drives that are available at the Apple Store and, of course, Fry's, and probably everywhere else you'd expect. He goes further to recommend three separate backup programs.

But one caught my eye.

Superduper backs up a Mac by mirroring the entire hard drive. In the event of a problem, you could boot the computer from the backup drive. Best of all, it only costs $27.95. At this price, I'm more than happy to pay for something that is useful and not a gratuitious $300 that only a giant business can afford. The program is available for free download, but to "unlock scheduling, Smart Update (which saves a lot of time), Sandboxes, scripting and more!" you can register from within the program. So you can even try it for free (requires OS X 10.3.9 and above, by the way).

For such an important function, and at such a low price, it pays to register.