Why Clone?

You've all heard ad-nauseum about how important it is to backup your computer files. I submit that a data or file backup is just one part of the equation. The other is cloning.

Cloning is a much different type of backup. Let me compare/contrast for a moment. With "standard" backups, you run jobs to create copies of your most important files - your precious digital photos, word processing documents, and so forth. You backup on a frequent basis, enabling you to recover a specific file from a specific point in time. It might be a basic, manual copy to a CD or keychain drive, but hey - you've got an extra copy of the stuff that's important to you. The goal of frequent and regular backups is to give you data recovery options.

A clone, on the other hand, is just what its name implies - an exact replica of your hard drive, including not only your files but the Windows or Mac operating system itself and the drive's boot settings (its "DNA"), plus all applications and settings. The goal of cloning is to give you disaster recovery options.

Cloning involves either launching a special application that can take "snapshots" or copies of data, even off of disk drives you're currently booted into, or booting from a special CD or floppy disk. Next the data from your hard drive is written to files on another hard drive. It could be an external USB or firewire drive, a secondary internal drive, or even CDRs or DVD-Rs. Those clone files are also called disk images. Products for cloning include Symantec Ghost and Acronis on the Windows side, and SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac side. There are others as well; these are just the ones I'm familiar with. Note than any of these four sites will provide more information about what cloning is and why it's important.

I mentioned before that the goal of cloning is to give you disaster recover options. Imagine right now that a water pipe broke in the ceiling above your basement office, and water trickled down overnight onto your computer and fried it. Your insurance company will probably pick up the tab for a replacement computer, but they can't very well help you get back your bookmarks, address book, financial files, digital photos, and even your favorite games.

Now, if you did standard backups to a separate drive and you have that drive stashed away, you at least know you've got your data. But think of the time it's going to take to set up Windows and your programs all over again! If you've got a cloned version of your hard drive, however, what would take several days is only going to take a few hours. You don't have to dig out all your serial numbers and CDs, reinstall Windows, deal with re-activating software, and reset all your personalized program settings such as bookmarks, desktop preferences, and so forth.

The best of all possible worlds is to have a regular, automated data backup system - nightly or weekly, and clone once every few months. Or clone right before you make any major changes to your system, so that if something goes wrong you can go "back in time" when things still worked. And if your computer data is critically important - if it's a major part of your livelihood - consider storing backup and clone drives off-site. I keep a clone and data drive for my home system in a drawer at my office, and vice-versa.

Great new Mac app

Check out Skitch sometime - a great new screen capture and quasi file-sharing app for the Mac.



It's kind of hard to describe what's so great about it above other screen snap programs, but I'll try:

• It's free
• You can easily annotate and draw over your captures - the text and the arrow on the capture above took all of 5 seconds, no need to open an entire full-fledged imaging app such as Photoshop or Fireworks
• You can keep a history of your screen grabs
• You can drag right out of Skitch into any other app - take a screen shot, make some comments or draw some arrows, and drag it right into your email application
• You can send your captures to the Skitch web server and generate a link, then give that link to others so they can view your stuff online
• You can also send your captures to your own ftp site or to your .Mac account

When Blur is Good

If you're the sort to mess around with digital photography from time to time, you've probably experimented with ways to fix problems in your images. Red-eye removal, for example, or maybe a little sharpening to make things a bit crisper. 

Using a blur effect, believe it or not, can also fix problems in photos. There are two main areas where this can work. One would be working with an image file from a scan. If your scan picks up too much texture from the paper upon which the image resides, it can result in a moire effect on details, especially fine lines. It can also have a disturbing effect on skin tones - see the scan of a photo of my mom when she was a little girl. Looks like she had some sort of pox!

Anyway, start with a quarter-pixel basic blur, and see how that does for you. Ratchet it up until the undesirable effect is gone, but before you start to soften the image too much.

Before-and-after, enlarged to show effect.

The other place where blurring REALLY comes in handy is for when you want to include photos in your movies - for example, an iMovie that mixes video with a nice pan/scan effect over digital photos. Photos that contain a lot of thin lines or textures or patterns will often appear to "quiver" or pulsate on the screen, not too badly on the computer but much much worse on a TV set. This has to do with a lot of different factors such as interlacing, but just know for now that to get around it, put a 1 pixel Gaussian blur on your photo before laying it into your timeline, and your problem will be solved!

And don't forget - don't go by what you see on your computer screen alone. It's no substitute for burning a DVD and watching on a standard set when you need to be sure that everything looks as good as it can.

Bad, video card. Bad!

If you've got a Mac Pro tower and you're thinking of upgrading to Leopard, know that Leopard apparently pushes graphics cards in ways Tiger did not. Unfortunately, as a result, certain viddy cards that were marginal on Tiger suddenly become problematic on Leopard.

It's bad enough that Apple offer few video card options in its high-end towers, and what it does offer is often weak and lagging behind the PC world. This, from a company making hardware and software to support content producers!

Anyway, when I got my Mac Pro tower, it wasn't long until I wasn't satisfied with the stock nVidia card that came with it. So after a few months I got the ATI Radeon 1900 upgrade. A 512 meg card. Good card, greatly improved performance in Aperture and then later Lightroom when I made the switch. It was expensive, though. Ouch.

Flash forward about one year. Do I still think it's a good card? Not so much. I upgraded to Leopard, and now the card is showing its weaknesses. Based on discussions over at the Apple forums, I'm not alone. Leopard apparently pushes the card harder, and it can't take it and suffers from overheating issues. The on-screen symptoms are thin vertical lines that appear within and stay with windows, at random times, and occasional tearing. Of course, now that I'm writing about and want a screen capture to show you, it's not doing it! 

In Boot Camp, the card is all but worthless. Playing a PC game, I can expect maybe 15 minutes tops before the card overheats and locks up the entire system. When it does work, horrible artifacts pop up all the time - like a long black spike right out of the top of my airborn soldier's helmet. Kinda hard to move around underground Nazi bunkers with one of those sticking outta your noggin. 

Those that reverted from Leopard back to Tiger saw the problem go away. And if you bought one of these cards recently, apparently you will NOT experience the problem as it's in the third revision. I had a first revision. I guess the figured out the issues.

(By the way, if you want to find out how hot or cool your Mac Pro, Macbook, or Macbook Pro is running - and control its fan speed - check out smcFanControl (the 2.x version). Pretty neat. If I know I'll be pushing the video card, I can bump up the fan speed to help keep the temperature down.)

The good news is that Apple is sending me a replacement card, free of charge, even though I'm past the one year warranty date. I think they realize it's a defective card by now - if all the complaints in the forum are any indication.