I haven’t written about this before, but judging by the number of people who react with “wow! never thought of that.” I figured it was worth noting. Despite my earlier admiration for the Mirra, it stopped working on my laptop a couple months ago. I finally stopped trying to get it to work, and let it serve as a home backup device only (still valuable, just not quite as useful for me).
I knew I needed to have a good backup strategy, and the Mirra wasn’t helping… and at some point I realized that I was carrying the answer: my iPod. I have the 60 gig video iPod… and my music, TVs and movies take up about 12 gigs. That left plenty of space to fill — and by enabling the “disk mode” on my iPod, I was able to periodically drag “My Documents” over to the iPod as a backup.
CDW just sent my replacement hard drive via courier, so as soon as I’m done creating the recovery disks (thanks, Jake, for letting me borrow your computer for that process!), I’ll be able to start the slow process of rebuilding the laptop… and once I connect the iPod, I’ll have a relatively recent copy of all of my data. Not perfect, but not nearly as bad as a hard drive failure could have been.
2 responses to “iPod backup (not what you think)”
You know, RIck, you're in for seven years of bad luck for breaking your Mirra.
[…] Rick Klau, who is lucky in love, which is good as he appears to be unlucky with his ThinkPads, suggests regular backups of document folders to your 60 G iPod. Well…that is possible, surely, and easy to do, but it seems like a waste of space, somehow, even if you aren’t using the space, otherwise. You can do the same thing with an external drive, through your USB 2 or Firewire port, and a cost of about $100 for oodles and oodles of drive capacity. (I hesitate to specify drive capacity. 80 Megabytes at that price was common last year. This year, you can double or perhaps triple that for more or less the same price.) […]