The First Success

It was almost a week ago that I last posted on this blog. Since then, I had a weekend, followed by four glorious days off, and all to myself. I stayed busy enough on those days that I didn't think too much about the transition. However, I used my ThinkPad quite a bit. I just wasn't thinking too much about not having a Mac, which is the whole point.

I said in my last post that I would write about my first success. At this point, I'm not even positive what I was talking about, but I think it was the fact that I got a usable backup of my Mac files before turning in the Mac on my last day. And it was as easy as just buying a new drive. I happened to be at Walmart last Thursday night, and I spied a 500 GB drive for $49 -- a Seagate drive. Thought I didn't give it much credence at the time, and it wasn't the reason I bought it, the label specifically said something about supporting both Windows and Macs. This is basically true for every drive made. But this one took it a step further.

First, the default formatting for this drive is NTFS, not FAT32. NTFS is way better than FAT32, for a lot of reasons. But it still can't be read natively on a Mac (except in read-only mode). The software that comes on this drive includes a Mac driver for NTFS that allows read-write access to NTFS. So I installed that driver, rebooted (yes, rebooted on the glorious Mac... sorry for what I said before about Windows and reboots), and then mounted the drive in read-write mode. Then I simply dragged my home directory (over 130 GB) onto that drive and, after making sure it was going alright, I finally had the peace of mind to go to bed.

The next morning I woke up and checked on the copy, and all was fine. I took the drive and plugged it into my ThinkPad, and I was able to open the files. No problem. This single act make it about a thousand times easier to turn in my Mac later that day.

But it was still hard, and disorienting, especially since I turned in my iPhone at the same time. I felt really naked after turning both of those in. In retrospect, I should have at least taken my ThinkPad to the office that day, so I would have SOME way to connect to the internet after turning in both of those devices. Oh well, live and learn. Eventually I got home to my (now) beloved ThinkPad :)