I've never had a hard drive fail, and yesterday I decided that since a lot of the critical data for my project is stored on my laptop, I'd better start backing this up. I bought the original 17-inch PowerBook available from Apple so I was blessed with Firewire 800 (twice as fast as the original firewire 400)… and boy was it time to start using it.
I was originally planning on getting Maxtor's OneTouch backup solution (250GB), but none of Maxtor's products had Firewire 800… so I ended up going with a LaCie 250GB USB2.0/Firewire 400/Firewire 800 drive. Can't go wrong there… that'll hook up to about anything. What kind of sucked was that I didn't have Maxtor's “OneTouch” backup software, but I later found out that LaCie offered a freeware backup solution that was fairly similar, so I was set.
The LaCie drives were hard to find… every CompUSA across the country was sold out of every size but the 500GB one… which was WAY too expensive… but I later learned that the Apple Stores had every size in stock. The problem was that yesterday I had no car because my brother took ours to work. Damn it!
So I ended up ordering it from Amazon yesterday afternoon with overnight shipping. By the end of the evening, it hadn't shipped yet according to their order status page (it was listed under “shipping soon”, and I was pissed.) I assumed it was a mistake because I'd ordered it so early in the day with overnight shipping and they had it in stock, and it seems I was right because I woke up this afternoon (hah) and it had shipped from their warehouse in PA. Nice! It'll be here tonight.