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October 18th, 2009
I was able to restore the operating system and data on the Mini after the technicians who fixed the hardware replaced the software. I had the whole thing backed up but it took me a couple of days of research to find out how to restore the whole system instead of just a few files.
Cathy didn't have any problem with her data because she keeps her stuff in the cloud. I restored the operating system on her machine and she was ready to go with no real fuss.
The Windows machine was fussy. The people who repaired it gave me a new hard drive with an operating system in place, but it would no longer talk to my wifi network and all of my programs and data were gone. Well, presumably they are still on the original hard drive; I just can't get to them.
Until now.
I got a USB-connected hard drive enclosure and a USB-connected hard drive cloning device (with cloning software), assuming I could copy the contents of the bad hard drive to a new hard drive.
First, I tested the new enclosure and the old hard drive, to make sure both worked and that I could read from the damaged drive. I connected to the Mini and told it to copy over a bunch of photos, nearly 4,000 of them, to a USB-connected storage device. It took over three hours to perform a task that should have taken under twenty minutes but all of the files transferred.
The next step was to place a new hard drive in the enclosure, to receive the copy. I had previously purchased three 120 GiB hard drives to clone another machine. Unfortunately, Cathy has been cleaning up the basement, where they were stored, and she had cleverly stored them where I couldn't find them. I eventually found two of them.
Some day soon, I will plug in the new drive and connect the damaged drive to the cloning device, then run the software to make the clone. I expect this to take a long time, perhaps several days, so I want to get it right the first time. I don't want to have to repeat the process. With any luck, enough of my data files will be restored that I can get back to business as usual.
The problem is my Palm handheld device. It refuses to talk to Macs except to synchronize the calendar, the address book and my memos. It won't synchronize my diabetes data or produce reports from the diabetes data. I can't even move the handheld device to a different machine because all of the purchase information and passwords are still saved on the Windows machine's defective hard drive.
I hate to find myself in this situation because everybody writes programs only for use on Windows systems. I've spoken to the people who produce Diabetes Pilot, particularly now that they've made that program into an iPhone app. They told me they would consider writing a Mac version of the program if the demand got high enough but that I shouldn't hold my breath.
To make things worse, Palm has developed an attitude problem in the last year, perhaps longer. Now that one of their cellular phones has become popular enough to be compared to the iPhone, they don't want to permit apps that they haven't developed themselves in house. I've had enough of their temperamental and quirky ways. I'm almost ready to replace the Palm device with a different device. I came close to doing it once.
One candidate device is the iPod Touch, which has all of the benefits of the iPhone without the handicap of having to deal with AT&T or whoever has the iPhone monopoly. That will continue to provide me with the kind of portability I get from the Palm, too. But I've become sedentary, rarely departing from my cocoon. A small laptop would serve equally well.
I actually had the laptop in hand and was pleased with its size, weight, appearance and capabilities, an Asus eee netbook running Windows XP. Delia and Cathy made me send it back because they didn't understand why I thought I need it. That would still be a workable solution. But new possibilities have popped up. The rumor mill churns with news of a possible new Apple touch screen device that would fall somewhere between the Touch and their bottom-of-the-line notebook. And Asus has leaked information about their dual-screen touch screen device, possible with a Qi display, a new technology that can operate in a mode that has the low power consumption typical of electronic ink displays. Both of these touch screen machines would make decent ebook readers, which may be their primary appeal, and could free me from my Kindle machine.
But neither of the touch screen machines will be available this year.
I can wait (I hope).