I am a firm believer in keeping my devices backed up and have been saved by that practice more times than I care to admit. When I picked up the MacBook Pro I had visions of keeping it backed up with my 160GB Seagate external USB drive but it turned out to not be compatible with the Mac OS. I have been looking for a reasonably priced solution and found it at one of my favorite online retailers, B&H Photo in New York. What I picked up was the Buffalo 500GB external HDD with both USB 2.0 and FireWire connectivity. I wanted FireWire so I can use it as a boot drive with the MBP in the event something happens to the internal HDD. The drive was reasonably priced at $195 and it arrived this week.
The drive is a speedy 7200 rpm and setup took all of 5 minutes. The drive was formatted FAT32 to allow usage with both Mac and Windows PCs but I quickly used the Disk Utility to format it to Mac Extended for that boot capability. I downloaded a free trial version of SuperDuper!, a simple backup program for the Mac. The free version is full featured, just missing the ability to schedule a backup. Buying the $28 version adds that feature so that’s what I did. Backups are very fast with this drive and I now have peace of mind that I’m covered in the event of a disaster. A couple of years ago I would never have imagined I would have a hard drive in my office with half a terrabyte of storage. :)
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2007\/05\/26\/macbook_pro_all\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_5dcff8c0340061899ef46e9e29d4ca5f","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}