MacBook Air.......ARGH!

Ok... I have no shame. I was sitting outside the Apple Store this morning watching the various blogs running down what was announced at MacWorld. The doors opened at 10, I put away my MacBook Pro and moved to one of the store machines with various windows open keeping the info flowing on all the latest and greatest from the big Steve Jobs Keynote.

All looked good, including the MacBook Air until I took a look at some of the specs... sooooo close... yet it has missed the mark in my opinion. At least for the time being, my credit card sits safely parked in my wallet and I will continue to use my boxy little black MacBook.

There are some really cool things Apple has done with the laptop. The size is great, the multi touch controls are cool, and the fact that they have gone waaay green with the MacBook Air is cool. I don't think that it is a bad laptop for everyone.

If size is your main criteria and you don't use a lot of accessories, this could be the machine for you, but as a working photographer, here's why it isn't the machine for me:

1. No firewire... it is apparently USB bootable, but still... I want firewire. With the difference in speed and the $$ I've invested in all the firewire accesories, I don't plan to toss them for a slower USB2 solution.
   
2. No removable battery. Why, why, why... Obviously the designers have never flown cross-country on an airplane with no outlets for charging a laptop. I don't want to be stuck with the battery in the laptop and no way to replace it. We (my wife and I) had one of the original orange and white iBooks (it was my wife's work laptop) and the only problem it ever had was the bolted-in-battery. The specs say five hours of battery life... not that Apple ever makes overly-optimistic claims about their batteries...
   
3. One USB port. So pick one device and plug it in. Or for more than one device you can use a USB hub... oh, you want to use a bus powered device like a hard drive and an EVDO modem on the hub, no problem, you better find a powered USB hub then. That means you better find a plug to use it, too... not too mobile of a lifestyle if you have to travel plug to plug to use more than one accessory at once.
   
4. No ethernet port. Airport is cool, I like Airport, I use Airport, but I also like ethernet. Sure there is an ethernet dongle, it plugs into... you guessed it! The lone USB port.
5. No internal CD/DVD drive. Years ago I owned a laptop that was really small and cool... except that it had no internal CD/DVD drive. It didn't bother me until I tried to balance the laptop and the external CD/DVD drive on the airplane seat tray... it is actually easier to use a 15" or 17" laptop than to fiddle with a smaller laptop and an external drive.
   
6. No ExpressCard slot. I have gotten to like the ExpressCard slot in the MacBook Pro. It adds a lot more functionality than the old PCMCIA slot, and would have gone a long way towards me being able to live without firewire... sigh.....
7. Dinky hard drives. If you opt for the faster solid state drive and want to use Boot Camp you don't have much room left on your hard drive. That goes for the 80gb drive, too.
   
8. 1.6 or 1.8 Core2Duo? Have I gone back in time, isn't that slower than even the entry-level MacBook... no, it is 2008 and it is slower than the $1000 laptop.
9. It's new... I would wait a few months to see what if any issues come up once these laptops make it into the wild. While Apple makes pretty darn good laptops (generally) the first run of each radical new design tends to have some issues, some persistent, others easily fixable. I would wait to see how many of each this laptop has.
   
   
   I was really hoping this was going to be a real replacement to the 12" Powerbook. I was at the Apple Store and ready to throw down the $$ but unfortunately this just isn't the Mac for me. :-(
   

Backing up Your Mac - Long Term Archiving

In addition to daily backups to protect work in progress, you should also be doing long term archiving of all your images and critical files. Unlike daily backups where you can access your backed up data quickly because it is plugged in to your computer, if you don't break your backups up, your backup system can be unwieldy if you are making it search and update 2TB of data every day.

How often you should perform long term archiving depends upon how many photos you shoot and how much space you are taking up on your hard drives.

I tend do to do archiving once a month. Doing it monthly keeps the number of images manageable and while I am archiving, I also compile everything for quarterly copyright sumbisison. I look through the images, delete anything that there is no use for (out of focus, mis-fires, etc.) and I burn everything else (from the raw shoots) to two DVD's (two copies of the same images.)

I also use a program called CD Finder to catalog all of the DVD's that I've burned so that I can search for photos using the database it builds. It is just another way to keep track of images.

One set of DVD's is stored on-site in my office closet in an acid-free box designed for the storage of CD's and DVD's. The other set of DVD's is stored off-site in a similar set of boxes. Both sets are stored in a cool, dark and dry location that isn't prone to big shifts in temperature or humidity.

After I burn the two DVD's, I move the files over to a hard drive that is only used for archiving. At the end of the year, I duplicate the hard drive (two copies of the same data) and put one hard drive in my safe deposit box at my bank, and the other with my off-site set of DVD's.

At the end of the year, I also burn DVD's and copy to the hard drive(s) all of my published images from the year, clips, copies of everything submitted for copyright (and copies of the submitted thumbnails) and anything else photo related that would fall within the year.

I reason I archive to hard drives as well as DVD's is because it is much easier to manage the data on a hard drive. If all of the data on my RAID got corrupted, it would be much easier to restore it from a few hard drive than from hundreds of DVD's that would have to be read one at a time.

The reason I archive to DVD's is because they are cost effective and allow me to do incremental archiving of images in smaller batches that I can then move to my off-site more quickly instead of waiting until the end of the year to distribute my backups.

There is still some debate about the lifetime of DVD's. If you burn quality disks, and verify the data, you should be in good shape. Most disks that go "bad" are bad because of scratches or they were left in the sun, or some other environmental cause.

You should store your archive DVD's in good hard cases (DVD's can get scratched in those cheap little paper sleeves) and use CD safe pens to write on them. You should store them in some sort of container designed for storing disks and keep them in a dry, dark, cool place. This will help extend the life considerably.

I figure that before I get close to the lifespan of a DVD, we will be archiving on something with 10 times the capacity... look at the transition from CD's to DVD's. So I am not fretting over the lifetime of the DVD's.

I would also advise that you not store your original files and all of your backups in the same place. Living in San Diego, wildfires are a constant threat, and there were a number of photographers that not only suffered the loss of their homes during the fires, but also lost all their photos and backups because they were all stored on-site. Spread your backups out so that if something catastrophic happens, you have other backups to rely on that are kept in other places.

You can even partner with another photographer to keep a copy of their backups and in exchange they store a copy of your backups.

The other thing that I use (and really love) as part of my archiving strategy is an external RAID where I also store every digital photo I've ever shot and all of my scanned film images, too. I use a Firmtek 4 bay RAID which I've been really happy with. I have 750GB drives in mine, and I am not sure I could live without it now.

The ability to have instant access to every image I've ever shot without even getting up from my chair is awesome. It has saved me hours of time that I used to spend pulling archived DVD's, getting the images off of them and then refiling them every time I had a photo request from a client. Using a RAID also reduces the risk of damaging your archive DVD's. Since the RAID is plugged into your computer, Spotlight catalogs the disks which makes it really easy to search for images.

Another advantage of using a RAID is that you can mirror the drives. Just like the name implies, one drives is a mirror image of the other. When you add or subtract files, those changes are made on both drives at the same time. When one of the drives in the mirror fails, you can pop in a new drive and the RAID will copy all the data back over to the new drive and you have no down time.

I use SoftRAID to run my Firmtek box (vs. Apple's built in RAID control.) It gives me more flexibility in how I set things up, and also gives you warnings if there are any problems with the disks in the RAID.

RAID is not a replacement for good archival backups, however. The problem with using a RAID is that if the data becomes corrupt or gets deleted, that change will be on both the original disk and the mirror (since they are the same) so having other good backups is critical. The mirroring is only protection against hardware failure, not data corruption.

Now is a great time to come up with your own archiving plan and start backing things up.