My Macbook Pro has been a little flaky lately, so I ran disk utility on it early this afternoon. Surprise: the hard drive was in bad shape and needed to be wiped and restored from a backup.

Backup…

On shore power, I don’t think about such things. My UPS is always on and therefore so is my external backup drive. Time Machine backs up my system once per hour. When boondocking, I tend to be laxer about such matters, only backing up when I absolutely need to run the inverter for something else….

I froze when I saw that message. I know better than to run systems maintenance before not only a Time Machine backup but also a bootable SuperDuper! backup. When was the last time I backed up? Yesterday morning. What had I worked on in that time? Nothing I needed to recover. My email was still on the server and the only picture I’d uploaded to iPhoto had been shared on Facebook. A day old backup wasn’t going to be a huge loss. Phew!

I don’t know what’s involved in wiping a drive and then restoring it on a PC to bring a user back to the exact same stage there were at when the backup was done. On a Mac, you just select the Time Machine backup you want to use for the backup and then go do something else for a few hours. I’ve complained a lot about Apple lately, but after a frustrating afternoon on the PC, I can only say that it’s good to be home.