Okey dokey

[ksmith]

Came home from Ravinia–Joshua Bell, wonderful as always–played with pups, did dishes, had a piece of toast. Opened up the laptop. Time Machine kicked in as I was phutzing around…

…and it’s telling me it can’t find the Airport Extreme Base Station. I can go online, and everything–the external HD, the Base Station, the laptop–is functioning.

So I go online and find out that Apple doesn’t support Time Machine with Airport Extreme. People use the set-up, but it isn’t reliable and data can become corrupted and I may not even know it.

Okay.

If that’s the case, I don’t feel comfortable using it anymore. What’s the point? So what’s the best way to save works-in-progress? Save directly to an external HD with a hardwire connection? DropBox? I can’t use iCloud because it doesn’t work with Scrivener.

(A few minutes pass)

Okay, I unplugged the external HD, waited a few seconds, and plugged it back in. External HD woke up, AEBS read it, everything is talking to everything else again. I did see that sometimes TM/AEBS can’t wake up a sleeping HD, and the connection fails. But the fact remains that this is an unsupported, unreliable set-up.

If I use DropBox, does it function as a back-up, or do I save my files directly to DropBox?

See, I miss the old Backup application that worked with Mobile Me. I set up the files I wanted backed up–not the whole damn laptop, but just the writing files–and it backed up on the schedule I set up. Clockwork. Never failed.

Guess I could burn a DVD. Does anyone do that anymore?

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

Comments

[thebluerose.livejournal.com]

Sounds like what you need is a small home NAS box with wireless capability. You would probably benefit from investing in a better grade of backup software to give you some flexibility but there are quite a lot of home options that have everything you need.

http://computershopper.com/storage/nas-drives

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2402433,00.asp

If you do get one, get one with RAID capability and get it set to RAID 1 so that the drives mirror each other. So that if one fails, then you still have the data stored in the other one. Its the first level of redundancy and once setup easy as because the mirror works instantly with no further intervention required by the user.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Thanks--I've been using the 1 TB My Book with TM (not sure if it's the World edition or not). Maybe I just need to use its software instead of TM?