SuperDuper!
One thing I am making sure I do when I send my MacBook back to Apple to fix that annoying screen flicker is that the drive is backed up. Last time I sent the drive to Apple, I just used the good old fashioned Unix tar command to back up the /Users partition. That turned out to be annoying to deal with.
Meanwhile, I’ve taken advantage of the slow news time to catch up on my video podcasts. A program that I didn’t know about called SuperDuper! was featured on an episode of MacBreak. It’s basically a backup program for MacOS. It’s “shareware” as a lot of the features require payment, but the basic functionality is available for free! The functionality I need? Image my laptop drive for in case Apple decides to erase it.
I have a 320gb ATA/100 drive I picked up at Office Depot plugged into a USB adapter. Yes, I have a bare drive sitting on my desk (well, it is on the anti-static bag). It’s definitely bigger than my 60gb drive in my MacBook, but it works. Yes, I could have bought a proper enclosure, but bare hard drives are so much more useful to me. I can stuff them in one of the many PCs I have.
As you can see from the screenshot above, once you get it going, it gives you an overview of the whole process. It tells you exactly what it’s doing right now. The whole process is like that–very verbose screens that guide you though. I may be sending these guys $28 to use some of the other functionality, but I think I’ll wait until after Christmas and after I deal with the fine folks at Apple a second time over this screen flicker problem.
