MacBook Pro Air? Retina Display?

[Dave2002]

Thanks for all this info!

I have word etc, already and will load in due course.

Haven't really thought about how I'm going to use my MacBook. Just to organise and playback my music collection, surf the net, muck around with my photos etc, etc.

You probably ought to think about backup strategies and how to keep music and photos sooner, rather than later. Mostly I think the kit should be robust enough, but occasionally "accidents" do happen and hard drives and/or flash memory sticks fail. Sod's Law means that this will happen at the most inconvenient time, and with your most important data!

If you are planning to do a lot with media files, music, photos, videos etc., then it's probably worth having one (at least) external drive for them - perhaps a 1 Tbyte USB portable drive - though you may need a larger one if you have a lot of media material.

It's also worth getting Apple's Time Machine working - you can use (say) a 1 or 2 Tbyte portable drive for that too - and it should work, since your machine is not that large, though it's larger than mine which "only" has a 256 Gbyte SSD. TM should already be installed on your machine, and will activate if you attach a new drive. You simply need a drive - a cheapish one will do, and you may have to overwrite whatever formatting it comes with - even it says it's "only" for PCs, and then just dedicate it for Time Machine. It should "just work". I resisted this for a long while, and it doesn't guarantee everything will be kept, but it really should "just work" and cover most eventualities. However if you do use TM and a separate drive for media you'll have to decide whether TM should keep a copy of the media drive(s) as well, otherwise you may still have a future problem. We know that rfg did have a problem with one of his machines - but mostly TM seems to work, and even if there are occasional glitches, most material which is scheduled for saving is, most of the time. If you do try TM, then make sure that you test it out so that you know that it is saving the files! Try creating some files which you don't care about, and then delete them. Then try to recover them a while later.

Note that because files which are "deleted" also get saved, that the drive used for TM should be rather larger than the main hard drive being backed up. TM might not work so well for some users who create vast files which get deleted on a daily basis - such as those doing music or video editing for this reason. A careful strategy for how to use TM would have to be worked out if that were the pattern of usage. Usually a TM drive 50-100% larger than the main drive will suffice for most users.

Another suggestion for backing up MBPs is to use the fairly recent Airport Time Capsule - probably 3 Tbytes would be best, though I'm waiting for the next model, as the current models only do USB 2 interfaces for external drives - https://www.apple.com/uk/airport-time-capsule/ Use of such a device allows you to back up several laptops and also desktops as well, besides having a rather decent wireless access point. This also uses TM, but communicates via wireless rather than being tied to the machine by a USB cable.

Lastly, there could still be a need for other backups - such as bootable clones of your hard drive. This would require yet another hard drive - perhaps a 1 Tbyte one in your case, assuming only one backup per drive, and the use of a tool such as Super Duper, which I'm currently investigating.

What you really don't want is to rip all your CDs to hard drive, and then have no backup copies - it'd be weeks of work wasted. You also want to ensure that anything which is really vital to you is backed up somewhere - but it all depends how critical things are for you. One can become paranoid, but being too easy going doesn't work.

For example, students often seek "extra time" because "all my work got lost because my drive went down" - usually a day before hand in! However, sometimes this really is genuine, and it'd be sad to see someone not get a degree or a masters, or even a PhD because of a failure to take adequate backup precautions. In some cases that could really affect the rest of their lives. Usually such people are warned of the dangers of sloppy backup procedures, but some just don't seem to listen. At perhaps £9k or more per year for a degree course, failure to graduate because of skimping on computer backup protection is just plain silly.

Good luck, and have fun with your new toy.

[Bryn]

You probably ought to think about backup strategies and how to keep music and photos sooner, rather than later. Mostly I think the kit should be robust enough, but occasionally "accidents" do happen and hard drives and/or flash memory sticks fail. Sod's Law means that this will happen at the most inconvenient time, and with your most important data!

If you are planning to do a lot with media files, music, photos, videos etc., then it's probably worth having one (at least) external drive for them - perhaps a 1 Gbyte USB portable drive - though you may need a larger one if you have a lot of media material. ...

I take it you intended 1 Terrabyte, but what's three orders of magnitude between friends.

1TB 2.5" USB3 drives are dirt cheap these days.



is less than £47 from amazon.co.uk for instance.

[Beef Oven!]

You probably ought to think about backup strategies and how to keep music and photos sooner, rather than later. Mostly I think the kit should be robust enough, but occasionally "accidents" do happen and hard drives and/or flash memory sticks fail. Sod's Law means that this will happen at the most inconvenient time, and with your most important data!

If you are planning to do a lot with media files, music, photos, videos etc., then it's probably worth having one (at least) external drive for them - perhaps a 1 Gbyte USB portable drive - though you may need a larger one if you have a lot of media material.

It's also worth getting Apple's Time Machine working - you can use (say) a 1 or 2 Gbyte portable drive for that too - and it should work, since your machine is not that large, though it's larger than mine which "only" has a 256 Gbyte SSD. TM should already be installed on your machine, and will activate if you attach a new drive. You simply need a drive - a cheapish one will do, and you may have to overwrite whatever formatting it comes with - even it says it's "only" for PCs, and then just dedicate it for Time Machine. It should "just work". I resisted this for a long while, and it doesn't guarantee everything will be kept, but it really should "just work" and cover most eventualities. However if you do use TM and a separate drive for media you'll have to decide whether TM should keep a copy of the media drive(s) as well, otherwise you may still have a future problem. We know that rfg did have a problem with one of his machines - but mostly TM seems to work, and even if there are occasional glitches, most material which is scheduled for saving is, most of the time. If you do try TM, then make sure that you test it out so that you know that it is saving the files! Try creating some files which you don't care about, and then delete them. Then try to recover them a while later.

Note that because files which are "deleted" also get saved, that the drive used for TM should be rather larger than the main hard drive being backed up. TM might not work so well for some users who create vast files which get deleted on a daily basis - such as those doing music or video editing for this reason. A careful strategy for how to use TM would have to be worked out if that were the pattern of usage. Usually a TM drive 50-100% larger than the main drive will suffice for most users.

Another suggestion for backing up MBPs is to use the fairly recent Airport Time Capsule - probably 3 Gbytes would be best, though I'm waiting for the next model, as the current models only do USB 2 interfaces for external drives - https://www.apple.com/uk/airport-time-capsule/ Use of such a device allows you to back up several laptops and also desktops as well, besides having a rather decent wireless access point. This also uses TM, but communicates via wireless rather than being tied to the machine by a USB cable.

Lastly, there could still be a need for other backups - such as bootable clones of your hard drive. This would require yet another hard drive - perhaps a 1 Gbyte one in your case, assuming only one backup per drive, and the use of a tool such as Super Duper, which I'm currently investigating.

What you really don't want is to rip all your CDs to hard drive, and then have no backup copies - it'd be weeks of work wasted. You also want to ensure that anything which is really vital to you is backed up somewhere - but it all depends how critical things are for you. One can become paranoid, but being too easy going doesn't work.

For example, students often seek "extra time" because "all my work got lost because my drive went down" - usually a day before hand in! However, sometimes this really is genuine, and it'd be sad to see someone not get a degree or a masters, or even a PhD because of a failure to take adequate backup precautions. In some cases that could really affect the rest of their lives. Usually such people are warned of the dangers of sloppy backup procedures, but some just don't seem to listen. At perhaps £9k or more per year for a degree course, failure to graduate because of skimping on computer backup protection is just plain silly.

Good luck, and have fun with your new toy.

Luck? Seems I need a Phd!!!

Seriously, I do need to get onto storage, back-up and time-machine etc, sooner rather than later.

[Nick Armstrong]

Seriously, I do need to get onto storage, back-up and time-machine etc, sooner rather than later.

I got one of these http://www.amazon.co.uk/LaCie-P9230-.../dp/B005CG8XME

- makes it so easy: plug in, instant, sorted backup and loads of space

[Dave2002]

Bryn

Msg 32

Corrections to storage sizes done - msg 31.

Unfortunately I'm old enough to remember when 1 Gbyte was a lot of storage, and I once worked on a machine which had 5 MBytes of removable disc drives. The drive unit itself was the size of an upright fridge - almost floor to ceiling! Worked on that for a couple of years, though have to admit it was around the mid 1970s, so probably 40 years ago. That's a factor of 500,000 if we relate to 1 Gbyte currently - over 5 orders of magnitude. Oh - I forgot to mention, the machine was then worth over £100k IIRC. I also worked on other machines which cost over £1 million, and were larger. One was in the largest European computer room at the time. The machine I'm typing this on is faster, portable, and has more store than any of those, and cost around £1.5k last year.

[Beef Oven!]

I got one of these http://www.amazon.co.uk/LaCie-P9230-.../dp/B005CG8XME

- makes it so easy: plug in, instant, sorted backup and loads of space

Might get one myself.

[teamsaint]

re D2k+2's #31, I do know of a student who lost his dissertation because his laptop was nicked. Unfortunately his back up was a memory stick, which was in the laptop at the time.

Have fun Beefy, looks like a full time job to me !!

[Dave2002]

I've heard of a few stories like that, and indeed some of them are genuine. One was of a car which if I remember it properly, was stolen. It was a supervisor's car, and it just happened to have a student's thesis in at the time - paper copies only in those days. I think it worked out OK in the end, as at least the thesis was recovered, and there wasn't a great loss of time, so no need for world wide alarms.

OTOH some students do claim all sorts of things in order to try to get special treatment.

[Frances_iom]

...
Unfortunately I'm old enough to remember when 1 Gbyte was a lot of storage,....

my first real programming apart from a bit of Fortran + Atlas Autocode was late 60's was on a machine with a 4MByte disc driven by a half hp motor! (a 16bit machine as used as backbone of ARPA net with 32kwords of real core memory) - part of my 1st home computer (which used 5.5" real floppies from early 80's + running a Unix variat called IDRIS) is in science museum - company I consulted with managed to cannabalise a few machines to give a working one on request by Sci Museum as apparently they were 1st UK built machines - my first IBM intel286 PCs came with an upmarket 20MByte drive !

[Stunsworth]

...my first IBM intel286 PCs came with an upmarket 20MByte drive !

Me too. It was a Compaq 'luggable' that looked remarkably like a sewing machine case.

[Dave2002]

my first real programming apart from a bit of Fortran + Atlas Autocode was late 60's was on a machine with a 4MByte disc driven by a half hp motor! (a 16bit machine as used as backbone of ARPA net with 32kwords of real core memory) - part of my 1st home computer (which used 5.5" real floppies from early 80's + running a Unix variat called IDRIS) is in science museum - company I consulted with managed to cannabalise a few machines to give a working one on request by Sci Museum as apparently they were 1st UK built machines - my first IBM intel286 PCs came with an upmarket 20MByte drive !

This is going to sound like the four Yorkshire men. My first programs were written in BASIC for a time sharing service, and were stored on paper tape. The programs did a form of character recognition by looking for features in handwriting. They weren't totally trivial, and part of a project to do recognition of handwriting. Later I progressed to cards (early 1970s) and then there was a bit of a jump to programs and files stored in main file storage on the machines. I learned Algol and Fortran at that time. The ICL System 4 machine I worked on for a while had a number of removable drives for storage - I think called EDS60s. You can see pictures of EDS30s and EDS60 drives here - http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/...1906a/p005.htm I think the EDS60s stored about 60 Million characters - so approx 60 Mbytes. Where I worked we had a number of those - perhaps twelve , two per cabinet, so we actually had something like 700 Mbytes. The Chilton machine shown in that article looks bigger than the System 4 I worked on - but the general principle of a machine which needed a large room plus air conditioning to support something in computing processing terms smaller than my MacBook Pro was still applicable. At one point I wrote a utility program to read and write data directly on to magnetic tape - a similar sort of tape deck to the ones shown in the Chilton article - with vacuum tape buffers. Later on I used other machines, and even some which had 8 inch floppy drives. VDUs were a novel development - allowing direct input - and I think I saw my first one around 1970. Before that input was by teletype, and we even had off-line data prep machines. Output was usually on teletype rolls or line printer paper. I didn't really get into graphics for a while, as there were few devices in the UK which could do them. However I do remember a Moon landing program which used graphics (vector graphics- only green!) on a display around 1975, together with a light pen to control it.

Yes, I am a dinosaur, but I don't feel like one.