award tour

I’m one of those people who never ever backed-up their computer. Never. Didn’t even consider it. I only started because back-ups with Time Machine on Mac OSX was so damn easy that I would have been foolish not to. I’m not someone with an ungodly amount of music or photos or ripped TV shows so I bought a portable USB-powered Western Digital hard drive (WD even has this model up to 750G in size). This thing has been a total gem. I’ve had no problems with it, it doesn’t need external power so it just sits attached to my monitor, and it’s the size of an iPod so if I ever need to share enormous files with someone I just bring it with me.

Then, a few months ago, I started thinking about Time Machine and how I use it: never. I had never actually put Time Machine to use. Every important document I have is on Google Docs, all of my code is stored (with complete history) on github, and my music and photos were archived on my iPod. I really had no need for historical snapshots of my data.

What I did worry about was my computer breaking and needing to work on a loaner for several days or having it completely die, needing to buy a new machine, and spending a full day setting up the machine (In my mind, this event always occurs in the middle of a deadline or while pushing something into production).

Going from a salaried employee to a bill-by-the-hour contractor does a lot of things to you, one of them is always putting a clear dollar value on your time. Losing the ability to bill clients for several days is something I consider “very expensive”. Luckily, there’s a very cheap solution to my problem. It’s called SuperDuper.

The app is simple and phenomenal and well worth it’s $28USD price tag. Every day at noon it starts making an exact bootable duplicate of my hard drive. The first backup took about 90 minutes and daily ones take about 15 minutes. This means that if my hard drive or computer died right now I could plug my external drive into another computer and it would boot up and function exactly the same. It wouldn’t be as fast as my internal drive but it would definitely suffice until I got a replacement drive or computer. Hell, if I was traveling somewhere and I knew whomever I was visiting had a Mac, I could bring my whole computer just by bringing my external drive.

Anyways, I’ve really enjoyed using SuperDuper and thought I’d point it out.

Today I worked with a client who needed to debug a couple issues. He brought in laptop, got everything fired up, and we started working. On Pete’s recommendation I had us both install Teleport for Mac which is like Synergy which allows one computer to control multiple computers as if they’re just other monitors.

I’m not a big peer programming fan but this setup was incredibly useful for debugging. Setup was dead simple and you very similar to configuring multiple monitors. We had the client’s computer as the main machine and he simply allowed my laptop to control his. No trading back and forth of keyboards so running commands that needed passwords (ssh, sudo, etc) was nice and quick since we could use both keyboards at the same time.

Teleport is also free so I’d recommend it to anyone in the situation I just described.