As you know, I'm frantic about backup. I use a Time Capsule with Time Machine along with nightly clones with SuperDuper while at home. I also use an online backup service called Mozy for off-site backup of mission critical files which runs in the background on a regular basis whenever I have an internet connection.

Last week, I was traveling and was away from home Thursday - Wednesday. While on the road I did not have access to my SuperDuper or TIme Mchine backup. However, I do make a point whenever I go out of town to backup just before I leave so I did have full backups to both methods as of Thursday morning. I was in a hotel on Monday night attending a convention for work when I turned on my computer and nothing happened. I'd hit the power key, the gray screen with the apple logo would appear, the little pinwheel would turn 5 or 6 times and the machine would power off. After multiple attempts I booted into single user mode and tried to run the fsck (file system check) utility command. It exited on error saying something like "error -8 file system structure" and could not repair the machine. Without any other utilities, I was stuck until I got home. Read More...

I don't use Windows much, but sometimes it is a necessary evil. When I originally installed Parallels, I very conservatively set my original disk size at the minimum, 8GB. With the new Service Pack 3 update and after installing a few programs within Windows I've found myself running very low on space. I used the Parallels Image Tool to expand my hard disk size thinking that would be an easy fix, problem is, it wasn't. Although the Parallels Image Tool does add more space to your virtual disk, Windows treats that as unused space. You can use that free space to create a new partition within Windows, but since I don't have that many files, that wouldn't solve my problem. What I needed was some way to easily take that unused space and allow my current installation of Windows XP to recognize it. After some searching I found a quick and easy solution so thought I'd post it here in hopes it could be of help to someone else.

1. Use the Parallels Image Tool to expand your virtual disk. This may take a while, so be patient, the rest of the process is fairly easy.
2. From within the Finder, create a duplicate of your hard disk image file. Mine was named winxp.hdd so the duplicate was named winxp copy.hdd
3. Open Parallels, but don't start Windows. You need to make two changes here. First, change the hard disk to the new duplicate image you just created. Second, add a second hard drive, and point that to your original virtual disk. Basically what you're doing is setting the copy to be your primary and boot disk, and adding the original as a secondary hard drive. In order for this procedure to work, you have to be booted from an image that is not the one you seek to change.
4. Boot into Windows and wait a few minutes for it to recognize the new hard drive. Once everything is up, go to the Start Menu and choose Run. Type "DISKPART" (no quotes)
5. Once inside DiskPart type "list volume" (again, no quotes in any of this) and hit return.
6. You should see to volumes. Volume 1 is the copy and Volume 2 is the original drive.
7. Type: "select volume 2" press return Then type "extend" and return. Give it a minute and it should say the process is complete. Once it's finished type "exit" and shut down windows.
8. When back to the Parallels settings screen, go back and remove the secondary hard drive that you added in Step 3 and set your original virtual disk as Hard Disk 1. At this point, we're putting things back the way they were before we started. You can also trash the virtual disk copy that you made in step 2.
9. Now, restart Windows and you should be back to your original virtual machine, though when you look at the disk properties, you should now see the extra free space. You will probably have to restart your windows after it's done recognizing the new hardware. Once that's done, you're back in business with your expanded disk space.

I've had several people ask me recently what my plan was for installing Leopard. Tomorrow, I will be doing a complete clean install of Leopard on a new upgraded Hard Drive for my MacBook. I've had the external drive for a few months now, but figured Leopard was the perfect time to install it since I'll be erasing everything off the Mac and reinstalling anyway. The process I'll be taking, will be very similar to what many of you will do should you choose to perform a full Erase and Install of Mac OS 10.5. Adam Christianson of the MacCast has posted a great show detailing his plan for upgrading to Leopard. For all the details, you can listen to Adam's excellent podcast. But in a nutshell, below are the steps that I'll take.

Disclaimer: This is a more advanced method of installing an Apple OS and not at all necessary for the average Mac user. I perform this plan because I like to take the opportunity to "spring clean" with OS releases. For most people, performing a simple Upgrade or Archive and Install will be just fine.

1. Confirm my Mac is healthy and in good working order (I'll perform a verity of maintenance tasks and hardware checks)
2. Print my database of Registration Info and Locate all my Application Installer CDs (this assumes you have such a database, if you don't now might be a good time to put one together)
3. Create a full bootable clone of my machine to an external Hard Drive (I use SuperDuper!)
4. Perform secondary backups of critical files (I backup my entire Home folder to my iPod and burn DVDs of my Documents Folder for later off-site archival)
5. Deauthorize my iTunes account (don't forget to deauthorize any iTunes account you may have running under Windows via BootCamp, Parallels or VMWare, etc.)
6. Deactivate any other software that only allows a limited number of activations, such as the Adobe Creative Suite
7. Sync all devices and .Mac
8. Repair Permissions
9. Unplug all cables except my power cord (I have a laptop- unplug all cables except power, monitor, keyboard and mouse if you have a desktop)
10. Boot from the Installer DVD and use Disk Utility to perform a final repair of the Disk
11. Use the Erase and Install (I choose the advanced options and remove extra printer drivers and foreign languages I won't use to save space and time)
12. Restart computer after install and run Software Update
13. Migrate my User Data only using MIgration Assistant
14. Reinstall Applications from their CDs and Download Shareware Apps from the Web (Check at this time to ensure 10.5 compatability)
15. Re-run Software Update, and run it until no more updates are found (this includes third party utility's software update programs)
16. Repair DIsk Permissions
17. Keep copy of old OS bootable backup for at least a month to ensure all runs well, take Backup DVDs to off-site storage.

Hard drives, like all technology, will eventually fail. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when, and how bad the data loss will be. Think for a moment about all the data you have on your computer. Family photos, financial information, personal documents. How upset would you be, if you turned on your computer one day, and all that data was gone. That very thing happened to me about two years ago. One minute I sitting in a class typing notes when my computer froze. I restarted my computer, and nothing happened. For whatever reason, my hard drive picked that very moment, to have a catastrophic failure. Everything was gone. Most of the time, there's no way to detect or prevent a hard drive failure. The only thing you can do is to make sure that you have a backup of all your important files so you can recover once a failure has occurred.

My Mac User Group friends have lovingly called me the "Backup Queen" for years and thankfully when my hard drive failed, I had complete backups in place and only lost about an hours worth of information. I've had several requests from people to post my personal backup strategy to the website. While I admit my backup plan borders on the edge of obsessive compulsive, perhaps you can modify it to suit your needs.

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