So, after the disaster the other week with my last scores backup (still waiting to get the final files list from the restoration guys for the second disk so I can give the go-ahead for the retrieval of both disks but the file list from the scores disk looks pretty healthy), I’ve decided to just throw myself at this backup concept and get things working properly for once in my life. It was on last year’s new year’s creative goals list so I guess this year isn’t too far off the mark to be actually sorting it out.

But it wasn’t really straightforward. First I wanted to make sure the laptop was as clean as could be, so ran Verify Disk (no problems) and the Repair Permissions (a bit messy). Plugged in the new drive, which was happily recognised straight away, set it to be the backup drive and set the first run going. 2 hours later it had obviously got stuck at 5GB. So I tried again… same thing. Ran Verify Disk on the new disk to discover it had a minor header error, so I ran Repair Disk, then erased the whole thing, reformatted, partitioned the new drive (because a 250GB hard disk definitely doesn’t need 2TB of backup space, I think)… whereupon the computer promptly crashed. Rebooted, reverified all disks, repaired permissions everywhere and finally got the backup running and working. PHEW! Who’d have guessed it would be so complicated?

Feeling a lot happier now it’s in place though. Once I get the other drive back though, I’ll probably completely reformat this new drive and the 1GB and the old one too and work out a new arrangement, but for now at least stuff’s being backed up against the increasingly frequent problems I’ve been having with this laptop. Glad a new computer’s only a couple of months away…

And I baked a cake.