It sounds like a country music song title. After reading maybe the fourth post somewhere about somebody’s MacBook hard drive had crashed, I thought I really really truly this time must take another look at the native backup program that comes with the Macbook called Time Machine. Previous efforts to coax TM to back up to a network drive hadn’t worked. This time I went to Staples and bought a Maxtor One-Touch4 Mini drive of 250 gigabytes in size for all of $149.00. This is a USB drive, powered from the computer’s USB ports. I say “ports”, because the cable includes two plugs for connecting to the computer and both of them must be plugged in to power the drive. So, this wouldn’t be the ideal solution, unless you have a USB hub or docking station.

Once plugged in, the Time Machine program came right up without me even starting it, with a dialog box asking “Do you want to use the OneTouch 4Mini as a back-up drive for Time Machine?” I said yes, of course, and then it told me that it needed to reformat the drive as a Macintosh Drive. Off it went and then the program automatically proceeded to perform a full hard drive backup. With the first backup complete, Time Machine will continue to back up changes every 15 minutes.

I expect to leave the hard drive permanently attached to the docking station, as it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have the backup media with the computer when I’m traveling. Still, if I wanted to, the drive is small and lightweight enough to easily fit into my briefcase along with all the other computer paraphernalia.