There comes a time when the old passes away, often to the premature glee of the young, and the next era begins. The writing was on the wall with Apple’s iPhoneification in Lion, and, as usual, Microsoft copies it with the SmartPhonification of Window’s 8. (Gawd, I wish Microsoft could think for itself!) We old […]

  In reply to a question about how publishers protect their software, and how that affects your backups: How?Well,  they keep that stuff close to the vest, but here are the general ways:The MAC address of your machine;The ethernet address of your machine;The GUID of your hard drive;The size of your hard drive partition;The serial number […]

The software is fine, BUT… don’t ever change hard drives; don’t ever have a hard drive go out on you. Don’t use a different ethernet card. Don’t add RAM. Don’t ever replace a motherboard, or buy a new graphics card…. because if you do, you’ll lose your license to use the software, and your only […]

I find “authorized” software, as a means of copy protection, extremely annoying. As a programmer, I’m forever mucking around with my drives, and software such as Adobe (almost Everything, but Photoshop annoys me the most) and NIK and MS Office et al, all require that you “deactivate/deauthorize” from one drive before you move the software […]

Folks who are concerned about email retention (as I am) might find this interesting:   http://www.mothsoftware.com/   Like MailSteward (MS), <http://mailsteward.com/> this software archives emails to an external database.   MailSteward does it automatically, at a scheduled interval you can set (or you can invoke it manually). All mail goes into either its own internal […]

Here’s something you’ll find interesting. While Mac’s don’t support USB 3 yet, USB 3 is backwards compatible with USB 2, which your Mac has. So? Well, USB 3 used in under USB 2 conditions (which I’ll call USB 3/2 to save typing) is much faster than USB 2. For example, the ADATA S102/16GB USB 3 […]

Think of it this way: blocks are “containers for data”.  Or, let’s pretend they are dominos, and the “data” are the dots painted on each one. line up 20 dominos. See the little dots on the tops of them?   a file-level copy will read those dots, and go to the destination, and write the […]

I bought my first Apple in 1978; sat down with Woz’s Red Book (which I still have) and taught myself programming. In December of that year, I was awakened by a woman, unidentified, who has seen my advertisement for “Apple programming.” She asked what I thought of Apple’s own accounting software. I replied that I was not […]

Got a new SSD, or a Raptor? Need to squish down that boot drive so it will fit? Most likely your User (Home) folder is the single largest item on your drive. For example, of my 520 GB of files, 205 GB of it was my home folder. Moving that to a different drive (and […]

I’m a huge fan of SuperDuper! and I’ve used it for years. “Fan” because it’s saved my bacon several times. When a drive dies, I just remove it and use the SuperDuper “clone” and I’m up and running in under 5 minutes. That said, it’s a “file-level” clone, fully bootable of course, but it’s not […]