Monday, October 23, 2006

Many times you hear people say that you need to have a backup of your hard drive and files. What does this really mean and why should you do it? Well there are several reasons, hard drive failure, fire, corruption of data, and theft. But when is a backup really a backup? Only when you keep these items in different places. When you put all of your items together and they get destroyed or stolen you didn't really have a good backup. One of our members had their two iBooks and their backup hard drive stolen while traveling last month. That person is now trying to rebuild their computer from two-year-old data recovered from a now dead hard drive. So if you value your data leave a copy or a backup at home when you are traveling. If you're not traveling then separate your backups by hiding them or making CD/DVDs and asking a friend to keep them for you or put them in a safety deposit box. Just remember all the work you have put into gathering all that information for family and work. Just remember it takes a lot longer to retype all of your data than it takes to reinstall the system and programs. 8:01:49 PM    comment []

The release of Aperture 1.5 was a good update for this $300 program, however it spurred Apple to release a slew of updaters for iLife and iWork to make sure they function well within Aperture 1.5. While updating all your other applications is a pain, if you use Aperture or if you bought Aperture hoping to use it with a Mac Mini youre in luck. One of the improvements in Aperture is that you can now run it on lower end machines. However I suggest putting at least 2 Gig of RAM in those machines if you have large databases of photos. What it looks like to me is that Apple is trying very hard to make sure Adobe does not introduce Lightroom and suck up market share that could have gone to Aperture. If you look at the improvements and the price tag dropping from $500 to $300 it's all about getting market share before the competitors have a chance to compete. 7:39:28 PM    comment []

This has been a busy time for Apple. New machines followed by new iPods and then software updates galore. One of the first was the release of iTunes 7.01 to try and combat the bugs and problems created for users in version 7.0. Keep in mind that we always warn you to wait a couple weeks so if anything bad happens you won't risk your iTunes library being damaged. Most users believe if Apple has posted something it's good to go. I believe that given a little time and research you no longer have to depend on luck, plus you have thousands of other people willing the risk their computers just to test it for you. 7:38:22 PM    comment []