Last week I had a bit of a scare when my jump drive blandly informed me that no computer I had access to would read it anymore. This was an inconvenience, since I’d just downloaded a program to install on my parents’ computer onto it (since the parents don’t at this time have the kind of internet connection required to get ten megabytes of DMG off the net); more significantly, said drive is where I keep all of my teaching materials, all of my research drafts, and a half-dozen other pretty vital things.
Fortunately, I’d backed up the contents of the drive not five days before, so that the only things I’d lost (other than the download I mentioned) were some files associated with a talk I’d given in Halifax. Since these were based on files that had already existed, I really didn’t lose anything significant.
To remedy this, I’ve gone and bought a new jump drive (for something like a third of the price I paid for the original, with four times the storage capacity) and also a large external hard drive for backing up, well, everything: my laptop, my office computer, my jump drive, and my portable HD for music and such. The backup software that came with the later has proven to be not terrifically useful, so what I’m doing right now is just dragging and dropping files from one place to another. This isn’t ideal, since the Finder in Mac OS X hides a lot of the unix internals, but at least most of the obvious stuff gets copied this way.