Adventures in software installation, part 2

Third try.

The dog, startled by some distant thunder, stood up suddenly and managed to unplug my computer with his tail. (He tends to crawl under my desk when it rains, becaues thunder confuses him. He’s been very confused for the last few days.) And Disk Utility won’t do incremental backups, only full-disk; and Carbon Copy Cloner doesn’t run under Tiger, and I don’t trust psync. So I’m now (7pm) a short distance into backup attempt #3; at this rate I’ll be finished right about the time OSXI comes out.

Which reminds me of the last time I did a major backup — I was transferring files from an old computer to my new one, and was feeling all manly and powerful because “Ah hah! This is UNIX! I need no crashy irritating user interface getting in my way asking for confirmation every twelve seconds; I can just “cp -r” to back up all my files! Long live the command line!” Which I did, and only after prepping the old machine to donate to Inkberry, which involved wiping all my files from it, did I discover that “cp”, the UNIX utility, didn’t include resource forks in its copies, because UNIX knows not these forks; the OSX developers, knowing this, had helpfully included a utility “cpMac” which would include resource forks, but had unhelpfully not, you know, told anyone about it. At least not me. Not until after I tried opening one of the files that included a resource fork, or should’ve, and now had the digital equivalent of a gaping hole in its chest, and realized that a couple years’ worth of Director work — all the source files from my thesis — were now useless husks of data. Cool. So this time I’m going to use the apple-supplied backup utility even if it kills me, and it looks like it’s going to.