I have been consistently blown away by the customer service from them.

I just flipped through some of the La Cie manuals, and it seems their one touch backup is a one touch automation of making a copy of your "My Documents" folder or your home folder if you're on a Mac. Which explains why I saw no mention of how to restore after a failure.

Is that the standard functionality for external hard drives and home backups? What about restoring a failed system? Something a bit more like Ghost, I guess. Is that still on the market?

::skitters off to check Time Machine::

No, that does what I want, and now I notice it will do it with any external HD. If there were some way I could work out how to image my PC onto the same hardware (I'm currently up to imaging the Mac and copying data from the PC), then I will have found my solution.

Ideas?

eta: Hmm. Looks like EMC Retrospect may be pretty close. Especially with their 3 computer license.

I have my disk out being diagnosed right now for $65. $119 for Retrospect +media (or free with some media), and I'd theoretically have been back up by now. And it's not like this is my first failure.

serially unrelatedly:

Macs don't come with something on to extract sit and hqx files? For some reason it feels kind of sudden that I can't get in.

I have Ghost.

ita,

maxtor backup drives will also make a whole system backup.

I've been using Retrospect to back up our home network for years. I highly recommend it. I have a script set up to run nightly and do incremental backups two one of two external drives, switching drives every other night.

I've been using The unarchiver these days to unpack the occasional .sit file. I really don't want to install the invasive crap that is Stuffit Expander.

I have Ghost.

Do you have it set to run automatically?

maxtor backup drives will also make a whole system backup

PC and Windows?

Thanks for the link, Rob. A couple of those screen savers look cool too.

The backup setup I'm envisioning--well, optimally it would be a NAS device with a partition for the PC whole system backup, one for the Mac system backup, and then a partition of network shared storage.

I think the Time Capsule and Time Machine come closest to doing that on the Mac side, and an app like Retrospect would take care of the PC side. I just would like to take care of the laptop wirelessly.

Do you have it set to run automatically?

Yeah -- but you're looking for something more complex, right? I don't really know all it does, but I have the instruction manual.

ita,

I have a maxtor that backs up my laptop. I run it once a week for the My Docs area and once a month for whole system.

I got mine as a gift, but I think this is it. I'm puzzled by the bimodal reviews. I've had mine since December and I love it.

[link]

Jane Espenson just mentioned Zhura on her blog, some kind of web-based alternative to Final Draft.

Thanks, -t.