ksmith | Midweek muddlings (Reply)

Spam has increased over the last week, I assume because of trolling for holiday shoppers. Lots of designer knock-offs and sports jerseys. Does anyone ever really click on those links?

Thanking the internetz for Akismet. Again.

Went a little nuts over the last 24 hours looking for my most recent royalty statement. I mean, I remembered sitting at the kitchen table and reading the thing a couple of weeks ago. Remembered setting it aside because I didn’t want to file it with the tax stuff.

There were three places it could have been–office, kitchen, filebox, and I tore the whole lot of them apart last night, then again over lunch and a third time after I got home from work tonight. Had I left the statement folded in the agency’s distinctively-colored envelope, or had I trashed said envelope? Had the statement gotten mixed up with three months’ worth of puppy medical records? It got to the point that I cleaned out the spare room so that I would be able to set stacks of docs on the bed and hunt through them page by page. Half a dozen blankets and comforters got lugged downstairs to the basement. Two brand-new pairs of running shoes were moved to my closet. Clothes were consigned to the laundry basket.

Found the printer manual–go me!

I found other papers I needed over the course of the search, but no royalty statement. After yet another go at the kitchen table, I went back to the filebox, which I keep by the living room desk. The top of the desk was pretty clean, relatively speaking–atomic clock, small lamp, box of envelopes…

…and tucked beneath said box, a distinctively-colored envelope that I completely missed seeing each of the 4-5 times I went to the desk to hunt through the filebox. Was it? Was it?

Yes! Statement!! Bloody thing.

It was actually a good thing that I cleaned out the spare room. Still need to get way too many messenger bags and handbags off the floor.

Amazing how a hunt for something chews up the evening.

In other news, back-ups. I had been using Time Machine since June. But I use it with an Extreme Base Station, and it’s my understanding that Apple doesn’t support that arrangement–I should be using Time Capsule, but I’ve read that they fail after a couple of years. There’s also the fact that TM seems to be one hell of a resource hog. Maybe my poor 5 yo Macbook is to blame, but these past 5 months on TM have been filled with hard drive racing and system stalling and crashing if I tried to open up Mail or a browser while TM was running.

I set up a Dropbox account months ago, and was also thinking of looking into Carbonite or something similar. But I use Intego Antivirus, and realized that one of the features is a Personal Backup system. I’d been staring at the little life preserver in the Macbook dock for a couple of years, but never opened it because I didn’t need it. Last night, I decided to give it a try.

It’s like a throwback to my late lamented .Mac Backup. Very simple set-up–I specify the files I want to save, the place I want to save them, and how often. I set up the wip to save to Dropbox every 2 hours, and it zipped through the process without racing or stalling. Most important files saved off site, and everything else left alone.

I will still perform full system backups every so often using TM. But I’ll use Personal Backup for everyday.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.