[…] My MacBook’s recent (complete and catastrophic) hard drive failure reminded me about the tremendous importance of good backups and big enough backup drives. Time Machine on Leopard was instrumental in preserving my sanity (it is a good reason to upgrade to Leopard). I wound up buying a new MacBook because I thought it would take a lot longer for the hard drive on my “old” MacBook to be replaced (it was still under warranty) and the new MacBook quickly picked up my Time Machine backup on my LaCie external hard drive and restored just about everything I thought I had lost. I even discovered that I had managed to backup my iTunes and iPhoto libraries! What I found, once I had my new MacBook up and running (it took me more time to reinstall all my apps than it did to restore the backup) I found that my external drive was too small to serve as the Time Machine backup for the new MacBook with its bigger hard drive. I set out to buy a second external drive and bought a Western Digital My Book 750GB USB drive which looks a lot like the one in the photo below: […]