My saga with my hosed hard disk is almost over. The people at the Apple store at Stanford Shopping Center took great care of me and swapped it out. Between luck, partial/old backups, and the hard work of my buddy Craig Hosoda, I have almost everything back in place.

The total cost of my dumbness was twenty hours of effort by Craig and me—certainly not a great way to end the summer. Indeed, “Labor Day Weekend” lived up to its name! Several people offered me advice and assistance and made me aware of two resources that I’d like to recommend to you.

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First, Adam Engst’s company, Take Control Ebooks, publishes a book called Take Control of Mac OS X Backups by Joe Kissell. It’s an excellent explanation of the concepts and tactices of backing up Macintoshes. Take Control usually sells this ebook for $10.00, but I leaned on him to give my blog readers a special 50% discount. When you click here and put the book in your cart, you will get a $5 discount. This special will last from 6:00 am Pacific on Monday, September 18th to 6:00 am Pacific on Wednesday, September 20th.


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Several readers mentioned a product they used called SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket. The programmer contacted me and gave me a copy. It’s very easy to use and quite effective, so to return his generosity, I hit him up for a discount for my readers too. :-)

He’s offering a 10% “Get Smart” discount
off the regular $27.95 price. The coupon is for the same timeframe: Monday 6:00 am Pacific to Wednesday 6:00 am Pacific. This is the first time—and possibly the
last—that he’s offered a discount for this product, so seize the day! Just enter the coupon code “getsmart” (all lowercase, no space) in coupon field of the
online store when you check out or when you register a trial copy.

Don’t be dumb like me and think that your hard disk will never fail! These two products will help you prevent wasted weekends. Forewarned is forearmed.