A couple days ago my mac crashed and on restarting the disk check found problems that it couldn't fix. Last night it hung up again and now it won't recognize the system on the drive...

So, in addition to other plans I had today, I'll be performing a search and recovery on my hard drive, hopefully not losing months of photos, email, assignments, and all the rest.

Gotta get a backup system in place. I've been reading the CVS Pocket Reference, and I'm planning on re-reading The Pragmatic Programmer (a book which, by the way, everyone who writes code or manages people who write code should read once a year). I really should start using CVS on a regular basis for backing up and keeping version control of my files. Of course, it really works better for text-based files than binary files, but it would still be a good habit.

This reminds me of when I used to work at Dantz Development (makers of Retrospect backup software) so long ago. The tech support folks would tell stories of people who would call and say "Um, my hard drive crashed today. I just opened your box and I don't know how to get my files back..."

Now that I have a reliable CD-R drive and media is so cheap, I really have no excuse not to perform at least a weekly incremental backup...

Do you back-up your files? If your computer disappeared tomorrow, how much would it change your life in the near-term?

Anyhow, chances are I'll just be able to boot up off the system 9.1 CD and recover the files, wipe the partition, and reinstall the system. Chances are...

So how am I even writing this piece? I'm typing on my linux box which, for all its GUI shortcomings, has been running without a restart for (checking...) 81 days. It would be longer, but there was a blackout in the middle of January. I hope OS X is as stable as that. But more on that later.