Catchy title huh? This is a short post but one that I hope might help a few people out. Firstly, if you are a PC user then i’m afraid I can’t help you with all the details, but at least read the first few paragraphs to find out why you might want to do this. In the past 18 months I have had three hard drive failures, 2 in laptops and one in an external USB drive on my desk. It happens and I hope by now we all know that. I’m not going to preach on backing up your files, that’s for another time…..
A few times in the last few months I have found myself working in a location that is fairly remote. No Apple store or computer parts store within a thousand miles, and not somewhere that gets any kind of speedy mail-order servicing either. So what would happen if one of my laptop hard drives had failed in one of those locations? This is mostly relevant to photographers who travel a lot, and especially those who visit remote locations, but the solution is actually fairly simple and remarkably cheap. A bootable external drive that can run Mac OSX is the answer. It doesn’t even need to be a 2.5″ hard drive, you can actually boot to Snow Leopard directly off a USB keyring as long as its big enough!