Written by W. Curtis Preston
Sunday, 06 September 2009 19:24
After spending three days trying yet again to resurrect a PC that had no hardware problems and oddly enough not even any viruses that any of my usual tools could find, AND wrestling with one PC that constantly doesn't want to recognze the USB, I've decided to go over to the dark side. I just ordered a Macbook Pro and two iMacs for my house. That oughta do it.
The ones I bought are used and slightly old, but are still Core 2 Intel-based systems, so I'll be able to run Snow Leopard. They could probably also use some more memory, but I'm curious how they'll run on "just" 2 GB of RAM. Speedwise, they're equivalent to what I had in the house. It'll be interesting to see how much more MacOS gets out of essentially the same hardware.
Since I've never actually used a Mac, I've now watched the "moving from a PC to a Mac" movies on apple.com, and I'm reading up on
ifixit.com,
macosxhints.com, and
versiontracker.com.
I'm excited and scared all at the same time. It will bug me to have to buy new copies of software that I already have licensed copies for on Windows, and I'm not sure what to do about that. (Office, Quicken, Dragon Naturally Speaking/Macspeed Dictate, Final Cut, etc.)
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My biggest beef is significant in that it involves useless backups. Time Machine coalesces backups such that only changes are sent every hour or so. This is fine by me and extremely efficient after the initial backup.
However, this means that the one file that contains all of the backups, a .sparsebundle file on the Time Capsule, is a point of vulnerability. On two occasions I have had to do a full restore of a system from my Time Machine backup and the .sparsebundle was corrupt in both instances. Mounting, verifying, and repairing the .sparsebundle in Disk Utility or the third-party Disk Warrior netted zero success. The complete restore in any shape or form was unsuccessful. I should note that I worked with Apple support the entire time and they were apologetic in recommending that I blow the .sparsebundles away and start over.
Being in this industry for a very long time, I still had another copy of my data but it is always annoying when the sexy solution doesn't pan out. I love Time Machine backups for the efficiency and I have used it successfully on an ad-hoc basis to restore files or directories, but one would be wise not to bet the farm on it.
Regards,
JOel
Also, TM backups are definitely better in Snow Leopard for me....not bad even with a ton of email in Mail.
Ah...I should have listed SugarSync in there as well -- has been better than DropBox for me overall and gives me that second level of protection for important stuff (i.e. business docs) beyond Time Machine.
One app I will recommend is Omnigraffle Pro. I find it much nicer to use than Visio and there is still decent compatibility with Visio + lots of free stencils:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/
One tip which may or may not be useful ... If you use IMAP for email and if you also have millions of email messages in your Inbox hierarchy like me (decades of UseNet and other mailing lists), I find that I can keep TimeMachine happier by excluding the redundant IMAP hierarchy (~/Library/Mail/IMAP-[your IMAP mbox specifier). Apple's Mail App rocks, searching my entire hierarchy is very fast. At least in Leopard, I found that TimeMachine walking my email hierarchy slowed it down considerably.
YMMV!
Some other two cent thoughts,
I use SuperDuper instead of Time Machine. This allows me to backup all to external disk and then boot from the external disk.
Don't forget apps and browsers that will help block virus, malware, phising etc. from your web browsing, email attachments, etc. Safari isn't secure enough for me.
Take a peruse through Apple Support forums for common issues. It does happen.
You'll want to use Time Machine for backups. It's insanely, absurdly easy. It's saved my bacon more than once. Want to buy a new Mac? Just do another backup (only takes a minute to update your existing one), then turn on the new Mac and plug in your Time Machine drive. OSX detects it and during the setup process, asks if you want to copy your profile & everything over. Bam, done. Same thing with hard drive upgrades - just pull your old drive out, put in the new one, install OSX and it'll pull everything from Time Machine automatically. It's the way backup software should be.
The only downside is that since it's a closed ecosystem, they want you to buy their gear if you're going to back up multiple Macs in one house. You'll either need an Apple Time Capsule, or external USB (or FireWire) hard drives, or one of the new IOmega StorCenters with Time Machine support. You can't just back up to a network share - well, technically you can, but it's unsupported and a bit of a hassle.
Have fun though! You'll never look back.
(dealram.com is the sister site where you might do your RAM shopping...)
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/
This one in particular for you....
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/switching
-Outlook - even with Snow Leopard's Exchange support, there are some things that can only be done in Outlook (server-side rules for instance).
-certain hefty web apps -- some require IE (a hefty Siebel one by a particular storage company actually
-storage simulators -- both for NetApp and EMC (I work with both to varying degrees...accreditations/certifications with both actually)
-Linux experimentation
-VMware lab environments - ESXi and/or ESX, VirtualCenter (has to be on Windows Server)....I have my VCP and do a good bit of VMware consulting
-Vizio every now and then (although I generally prefer OmniGraffle)
-Office 2003 sometimes for Excel/Word docs with really complex macros (Office 2004 has decent Macro support, Office 2008 and iWork have no macro support (iWork for obvious reasons, Office 2008 b/c macro support was intentionally dropped)
That's about it....
And....I was very happy when MenuMeters came out with a Snow Leopard compatible release....can't live without it. I could also add Last.FM to that as well (quite a good Mac client).
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