The First Thing? Reinstall the OS

This might seem like craziness to some people, but the default OS X install has a bunch of language files, fonts, and printer drivers that you will never ever use. I immediately get the restore disc out and do a clean install of OS X (in this case, Snow Leopard). To do this properly, once you boot from the install disc and select your language, click on Tools in the Menu Bar and open Disk Utility. From there, select your primary hard drive from the column on the left and click on the Erase tab on the right hand side. Ensure that Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is selected and hit Erase. Now you’re ready to hit the ground running.

Quit Disk Utility and you’ll be brought back to the Installer. Click continue until you arrive at a screen with the “Customize” button in the lower left. Click on that and uncheck everything in there so that “Essential System Software” is the only thing being installed. You’re already well on your way to a leaner, meaner system.

Update Everything, Install Only One Program

Even on my brand new machine, the first thing I had to do after booting up for the first time was apply critical system and security updates to OS X. This may take you a few restarts depending on how old your installation disc is, but with my method you’ll never need it again. After your system is completely up to date, open Disk Utility again (located in Applications > Utilities), select your partiton from the left (usually named Macintosh HD), and click on the button that says “Repair Disk Permissions” under the First Aid tab. I generally do this after applying large amounts of updates just to ensure there’s no data corruption now or in the future. If you want to know a little more about this process, check out Apple’s Support Document on the topic.

The hard drive should only contain the freshly installed-and-updated system: none of the programs you use, none of your user files like pictures, music, etc. I download only one program at this point: SuperDuper!

Time For the First of Many Backups

Some people swear by Carbon Copy Cloner, but I love the speed and interface of SuperDuper! — In reality both programs are amazing at what they do: creating a bootable backup of your system. The one feature of the new MacBook Pros and iMacs that got me jazzed was the inclusion of a dedicated SD card reader. The first practical application I thought of, beyond the obvious quick retrieval of photos and videos, was a bootable SD card backup and that’s exactly what I did. You’ll need at least an 8GB SD card for this to work, and I’d recommend Class 6 or higher. The Class of an SD card is a measure of it’s speed; Class 6 cards usually range in the 20-24mbps range, which is plenty fast for our purposes.

Insert the SD card into the dedicated slot or into a card reader connected via USB, open Disk Utility and select it (not its indented partition, but the device itself) in the left column. Once you’ve done that, click on the “Partition” tab on the right side. Under Volume Scheme, select 1 Partition, then click on the “Options…” button. From here, make sure to select the GUID Partition Table, which will make this SD card a bootable OS X device, then click OK to come back to the main Partition section. From here you can optionally name your volume or just hit the Apply button. Disk Utility will format and partition the card and it will appear back on your desktop. Quit Disk Utility and switch over to SuperDuper!

The interface here couldn’t be simpler: In the first drop down, you select your primary hard drive, in the second you select your SD card, and the one underneath should have “Backup – all files” selected. Once that’s done, click on Copy Now, enter your user password, and go grab a sandwich.

First Backup Done, Initialize Offsite Backup

You now have a fresh, up-to-date version of Snow Leopard you can restore from in the future should you ever want to start over or deploy a basic installation quickly on a new machine. Remove the SD card, flip the switch into the “Lock” position, and store the card away somewhere safe.

The next thing I do is install an off-site backup manager. There are literally dozens to choose from and after giving them all a fair shake I decided to go with BackBlaze. Here’s a quick list of other services you can choose from for the sake of fair-and-unbiased-ness:

• Mozy
• Carbonite
• iDrive
• Crashplan
• JungleDisk
• ElephantDrive

They all vary slightly in price and implementation, but all work great. I chose BackBlaze because it’s $5/month/computer for unlimited storage and installs itself as a simple System Preferences panel. All of these services say that the initial backup takes the longest, which is why I still don’t put any of my files on the computer at this point: I basically want  a working duplicate of my computer in the cloud. Your mileage will vary from mine at this point depending on your internet connection, but you basically have to upload roughly 12GB of system files onto the internet. This is something I let run overnight, while I sleep soundly knowing my data is being secured.

Finally, Move Your Files Over, Install Your Apps

I assumed a lot from you going into this article, not the least of which was that you had your data safely stored on some sort of external device or computer. Well, now’s the time to bring all of your goodies into the fray. Add your music, movies, photos, etc and order them however you’d like. If you’re as particular about your folder structures and naming conventions as I am, this could very well be the longest step. Also feel free to install all of the programs you use as this point.

More Backing Up

We’re almost at the home stretch, so now you’re probably thinking “What the hell more could we do to secure our data?” Well, we’ve already started on one: Backblaze.

After I moved all my files over and installed the programs I use on a regular basis, the amount of space I was using jumped from 12GB to 204GB. Backblaze (or whichever service you’ve chosen) will back all of that information up. For me, it took roughly 3 weeks (all the while adjusting how much bandwidth I wanted BackBlaze to use: more at night, less during the day, etc), so that’s pretty much a background thing that will be happening for a while. The last thing to set up is OS X’s own Time Machine.

Taming Time Machine

I love Time Machine; before it was introduced in Leopard I never had a backup/restore plan. I figured if I lost everything (thankfully that’s never happened), I’d just start over again from scratch — the force (of  laziness) was strong in this one. Time Machine made it easy and important to me to back up everything digital. Though it isn’t without it’s flaws, it’s certainly the solution a majority of people who use OS X are most familiar with. I don’t use any third party tools to control the times of day it chooses to back up, but I am very particular about what it backs up. Below is a list of folders that I explicitly tell Time Machine NOT to back up and why. If you’d like to save a little space on each back up, you can add any or all of these folders by going to System Preferences > Time Machine > Options.

• /Applications — This folder changes so often and drastically that I’d prefer to manage it on my own. If I need to get an app that I accidentally deleted, I’ll make sure to get the latest version from the company’s website.
• /Library/Audio — After installing Final Cut Studio and Logic Pro, this folder jumps up to a whopping 32GB. Again, if I accidentally delete something from here (unlikely), I’ll reinstall from the disc.
• /Library/Caches — Non-vital files that can accumulate in size rather quickly and change even quicker. No harm here.
• ~/Library/Caches — Same as above
• ~/Downloads — This folder changes so often that I’d rather not have anything in here backed up. I do pretty regular maintenance to keep this folder clear anyhow.
• ~/Dropbox — I’m a mega Dropbox user. If you haven’t heard of it, you should really make it a part of your life. Anyway, Dropbox files already live in the cloud (and usually on many other computers) and have the ability to go back multiple versions. No need to back this stuff up.
• ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync — Only applicable if you’re an iPhone user, but definitely worth looking into. I’ve synced my iPhone 4, which is loaded with video, to my MacBook only a handful of times, but this folder clocks in at 18GB+ for me.
• ~/Movies — I only use this folder as a drop point for DVDs I rip before storing them on an external drive. This is another situation where the folder changes so many times I’d rather not waste the time having Time Machine back up huge, temporary files.
• ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts — This folder might have a slightly different path depending on whether iTunes has updated your library recently, but I never bother to backup Podcasts since I download so many of them at a time, watch them, then delete a majority of them.
• ~/Documents/Virtual Machines — This is the folder that VMware uses to store Virtual Machines in. If you use Parallels, VirtualBox, or something else you’ll have to find out where they store these massive files. Basically, every time you boot into the virtual machine the files within are changed slightly, but since the Finder (and, ergo, Time Machine) only see this as one large file, it will back up the whole thing again and again. Needless waste of space here.

Dropbox and Alternative Approaches

Some files I choose to keep in my Dropbox folder for easy access: documents, some pictures, application data, and more. Dropbox is as good a backup solution as any if you’re willing to pay a little more for a very fast, very convenient service that offers a native app as well as a web interface.

It’s worth mentioning that you don’t need to back up to an SD card, but it’s a method I chose because they’re inexpensive, reliable, and fast. You could just as easily follow the same steps on an external USB or Firewire hard drive. Hell, you could even use a USB memory stick if you had one of those lying around. Another option would be to save that step until after you’ve moved all of your files and programs onto the machine and then create a bootable backup of your entire system. You can even automate this with the paid version of SuperDuper so if your primary hard drive ever fails, you literally boot into your backup and pick up where your last backup left you off.

Recap

Here’s how I roll, in list format:

1. Clean OS X Installation
2. Update OS X via Software Update
3. Repair Disk Permissions in Disk Utility
4. Create a bootable backup of my primary hard drive using SuperDuper!
5. Install BackBlaze for off-site backups
6. Move all of my files onto the hard drive, install all of my apps
   1. BackBlaze passively continues to back up all of these files
7. Set up Time Machine on my Mac, excluding several folders that are greedy with my gigabytes
8. Revel in the fact that I’m safe should my MacBook’s internal hard drive bite the dust

In Closing

There are clearly a variety of ways to ensure that your data is safe. None of them are perfect and a few of them (I’m thinking my way, for sure) are a hell of a lot of work to maintain, but when your primary source of income can be crippled because of something as small as a corrupted hard drive, it’s a good feeling to know that you’ve taken steps to make sure you won’t be out of commission for too long.

First Things First: What It Is

It’s not a phone, it doesn’t have a camera, and half of the models won’t feature a persistent data connection — assertions of it being a giant iPhone or iPod Touch¹ are mainly from an aesthetic standpoint.  On the flip side, it’s less than a laptop: no physical keyboard (without the special dock OR an Apple Bluetooth keyboard from what I understand) and no fully-featured version of OS X. I’ve read from event attendees that when you plug the iPad in to sync, you’re actually able to browse through the folder structure a la the iPod Disk Mode of yesteryear, so we sway towards the laptop side of the fence.  It is obviously running a variant of iPhone OS, so we then swing back into this middle area, which is exactly where Jobs positioned it from the get-go.

Who Is It Good For?

I will admit that my initial reaction differs greatly from my feelings on the device today and a lot of that was based on speculation that the iPad was going to cost somewhere in the range of $1000 to $1200 dollars. For a grand, the iPad would’ve gone the way of the G4 Cube or the iPod Hi-Fi.  However, for half of that price it becomes a significantly more appealing device for a lot of people, myself included.

The first group I could see gobbling this device up would be media connoisseurs. Not necessarily people who frequently purchase media online (though I’m sure that will be the case), but rather people who have a massive collection of movies, music, eBooks, or even iPhone apps that want this stuff on-the-go or just at arm’s length:

• You want the answer to the Final Jeopardy question before that snarky-ass Trebek?  Pick up the iPad and Google it.
• Want something to do while you’re on the can?  iPad + The New York Times app should be handy.
• Bored on your hour-long train ride to work? Go ahead and catch up on your favorite TV show to ease the pain.
• Could you imagine if Logitech made a Harmony app for it? Best. Universal Remote. Ever.
• So forth and so on…

Another group of people who might dig this device are the casual computer users.  One of the first things I thought when I saw it was “Mom would friggin love that thing” and I’m pretty that most parents (hell, even some grandparents) could get accustomed to the iPad right quick. The learning curve for the most used tasks: web browsing, sending/checking email, and maybe the occasional game are so minimal and intuitive that I’m sure moms and dads would have a solid understanding in less than a day.

The third and final group are the ones that seem to be scrutinizing it the most.  The media professionals that thought this tablet was actually the third set of commandments never brought down from Mt. Sinai. They’re yelling about DRM and iPhone OS and AT&T and so many other nuancical things, which are all valid concerns, but there’s the simple fact that none of the yellers have even used the damn thing. I can see writing up a well thought-out list of pros and cons after using a demo unit or even just playing around with one in an Apple Store, but the fact remains that all of these people crying foul about how locked down the thing is haven’t even seen one outside of the Keynote video. I would estimate that 25% of them will completely change their tune after holding one in their hand and using it for 10 minutes.

Here’s a list of actual uses I could see as possible for a media professional with the iPad:

• A photographer showing off their portfolio or recently-taken on-site photographs
• A video editor preparing to show dailies to a director/producer
• A web designer showing off photo comps OR working website demos in Safari
• As a presentation tool to ensure none of your fancy Keynote animations are lost in the shuffle

I’ll admit that’s not the greatest list at the moment, and true all of those things are easily accomplished with a laptop, but keep in mind that this platform is in its infancy from a developer standpoint. I’m sure we’ll be inundated with a slew of apps that will allow us to do things faster and better, just like on the iPhone itself.

Flash Flood

Perhaps the astute noticed that I left out all of whining over lack of Flash support. The amount of people that are upset by this is ri-god-damn-diculous. I never thought twice about whether or not this tablet would support Flash, my assumption was always “No, and that’s a good thing.”

Flash has been a good platform for delivering video up until the recent advent of HTML5, which offers a far superior implementation in terms of ease of use and overall user experience (no plugins required, above all else). YouTube and Vimeo, two of the largest video sites on the internet, have embraced this open standard and the implementation is flawless  It’s not an accessible platform on it’s best day and soon even animations will be able to be fully supported with the CSS3 standard, so I can’t imagine that Adobe will have such a stranglehold in the online video and “rich UI” market for much longer.

For the one or two things that Flash does well, we must recall the egregious offenses some Flash developers are responsible for, not the least of which are: god-awful, seizure inducing banners, walk-in advertisements, and sites that are 100% flash-based (cue subtle nods to most restaurant websites). Advertisers have gotten so out of hand that people have come up with solutions like ClickToFlash and AdBlockPlus in order to combat the onslaught.

Think of Flash as roller coaster cars that have finally reached the top of the first hill. Once half of them have gone over the edge they’ll pull the remainder down pretty rapidly.

Technically…

The iPad is a very capable machine. Without regurgitating all of the specs featured on Apple’s page, it was easy to see just by watching the demos that it’s a much fuller experience than what’s currently achievable on the iPhone. The custom chip created by Apple’s own manufacturer is clocked at 1Ghz, which doesn’t sound like a lot by today’s multi-core multi-processor standards I realize. Though I’m sure when paired with a perfect storm of cache, RAM, and a fast hard drive (in this case, the fastest: SSD), you get a lot of power in a little device. To put this in perspective, the iPhone 3GS uses the last generation of the same processor clocking in at 600mhz and most definitely less cache. Double the speed of the 3GS and you’re in the ballpark of the iPad.

Summing It Up

After doing a little bit of research on the device from a technical standpoint as well as hearing what attendees had to say after the hands-on demos, I think it’s safe to say that despite a harsh words from the Apple fanatics who thought this device would somehow change the entire world for the better, it might actually sell better than anyone anticipates. I, personally, can’t wait to try one out for myself… At which point I’ll be more open to hearing out the fact-based ramblings and rantings of the unhappy campers.

1 – I have the overwhelming urge to injure anyone who calls it an “iTouch” and I don’t know why.

Memory of travel is fleeting at best. Photographs serve as road-markers for returning to those experiences.

Read entire review here.