Happy New Year – My hard drive failed
I returned from vacation to find out that the 3 year old Western Digital boot drive on my Mac Pro failed and the machine would not boot. That gave me pause for reflection on what I really needed to recover to get up and running. Here is my list:
- Need to install OS X on a new drive. ($99 from Best Buy).
- Need to install Apple Aperture to do initial culling of photos and videos that I take before uploading to Phanfare. I also do minor editing in Aperture. (some day Phanfare will solve this problem)
- Need to install MS office because I still have some legacy files on NAS in my house.
- Need to install VMWare because I still use Outlook for email. My Windows image was stored on a SW raid in the same machine so that is intact.
- Need to install iLife so that I can test iPhoto with Phanfare. I don’t use much of iLife very often.
- Need to install Firefox and Chrome. I still can’t decide what browser I want to use. Firefox has become a memory hog. Chrome lacks Java support on the Mac.
- Need to Install dropbox. I am trying it out as a substitute for the NAS in my basement.
- Need to install Skype. I use it mostly for text chat.
That’s it. My music was on the RAID partition so I did not lose that. Music seems to be the last remaining data challenge to get running off the cloud. Apple probably has some ideas there with the acquisition of Lala. I wrote a post on how I would like to see the music service work at Apple.
