Moving in the 21st Century

A new computer is like a new house: it takes careful planning and a lot of work to move into it.
In my office right now I have my old (a relative term) G5 as well as the new Mac Pro. Over time, one’s computer becomes loaded up with files, stored all over the place and moving to the new computer takes a bit of housecleaning and logistics. For instance, when all is said and done, the new computer will have enormous storage. I’ll probably have 2 terabytes of storage in the Mac Pro — the G5 has only 500 gigabytes (that’s 1/3 less). I’ve already created a plan of attack for this storage, opting for a pretty staid and boring naming scheme for the plethora of hard drives — by number. (Just to keep it light, the #2 drive is named “Too.”)
It is astonishing how easily disks fill up, and I have a feeling that 2 terabytes (that’s 2 million megabytes for those of you still in the megabyte world) will not be enough once I deal with all the films for this year’s film festival.
I have also promised myself that I will faithfully back up all this data. I’ve never been one for backups, and luckily have never had a problem; it wasn’t until this month that I installed a backup disk for this very webserver — it was doing some limited backups to the same disc it was running on so that I could restore pages if hacked, but what good would that do if the disc failed? Don’t worry, it’s all backed up now every other night in the wee hours, so you’ll always have something to read here.
Like waiting for furniture in a new house, I’m waiting for hard drives and memory to arrive so I can begin boxing up the old stuff and moving it to its new home. Meanwhile, here I sit preparing for the move, marveling at the realization that I have so many computers in my house that I could start a data center.