Last month the hard drives in both my laptop and JEB's laptop died. On the same day. Luckily we do backups, so we didn't lose data. Thanks to the wonderful guide from iFixit, I was able to replace each one in about 45 minutes. It took a bit longer to restore them... But using SuperDuper to copy the backup back on to the new disk after booting up on the backup, the process wasn't too bad. The $30 I spent on that software really paid for itself.
Apple is coming out with Time Machine in Leopard, but I'm not so sure that incremental backups will all that great when your hard drive blows. The ability to go back and retreive deleted files is nice, but I have to hear more about whether or not going though all those incrementals when restoring is worth it. The nice thing about SuperDuper is that you have a complete bootable copy of you hard drive; just plug in the FireWire drive and pick up where you left off! Since I was able to buy a 500 GB drive at Costco for $150, I have room to do Time Machine and the SuperDuper smart copy I have been using.
Overall, Leopard looks pretty slick, but I'm wondering if my 1.25 GHz G4 PPC can handle it. I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to see what other folks say about it before diving in...
