My MacBook Pro has acquired insomnia and it’s firewire ports have given up the ghost so I’ve had to part with it while it gets repaired. It’s always annoying when problems emerge with new things, particularly when you depend on them to get work done, but it hasn’t worked out too badly. With Carbon Copy Cloner I backed everything up before putting the laptop in for service and commandeered the mac mini we have for testing so I’m up and running like normal – just a lot slower and with a tiny fraction of the RAM.

It is impressive that it’s so easy to create a fully bootable back up like that though. If you only back up the data you spend a lot of time setting things up the way you want them again, but with a full clone of the system everything’s just like it always was. It’s also nice to know that all my work stuff is stored on a server somewhere, either via IMAP, hosted web apps or in SVN so everything’s safe anyway and easy to transport between computers (my home PC is already set up for work if I need it).

Anyway, we’ll see how fast the repair shop can get it fixed. It’s a shame Apple don’t offer a guaranteed service turn around time – it would make it a lot easier for businesses but that’s not Apple’s target market. I’m far more productive with my Mac than anything else so that makes up for the longer service times on the rare (hopefully only) occasion I’ll need to put up with it. I doubt I’ll be this patient and understanding after a few days so I thought I’d blog now while I sound rational instead of just ranting and raving like a true blogger.