No, I didn’t throw it and I’m not switching. Someone broke our window at 3:30 AM and grabbed my PowerBook off the table. Gone.
A window breaking is really loud. We thought that the kittens had manged to knock down a stack of cookie sheets with dishes on top of it until we found the broken glass by the table. The Palo Alto police were really nice, but it was hard to get back to sleep. The kids slept through the whole thing, of course. And all this two days before we left on vacation.
The IT department has been really great — my new IntelBook is already delivered, waiting for me to return from Maui.
I miss the data more than the hardware. I wasn’t very good about backups, but I did treat most of the laptop data as volatile. E-mail lives on the server and I’m religous about the digital photos being on two separate storage devices before I delete them from the camera. Code is all in CVS. Software keys are copied to the home iMac. Still, there are plenty of miscellaneous things that are just gone, like notes from the Patrol Leaders Council (time to trust the Troop Scribe to take notes).
Since I’m starting clean on the new machine, I’m open to recommendations for Mac software (especially backup).
Most Casual Observer 
Um… I take it I should hide the laptop!
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Yes, hide it. Mine was visible from the street. There have been a number of laptop thefts in south Palo Alto the last few weeks. Most have been from cars, not from houses.
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For backup software, you need SuperDuper! by Shirt Pocket Software. I have not yet figured out its more fiddly options, but it makes a bootable image backup of a disk, and it has not failed me yet (in fact, I used it just last week to initialize the very laptop I am typing on here). It does this better than any other software that I have tried (I’ve tried CarbonCopyCloner, BounceBack, ChronoSync, and Apple Backup).
Important tip: if you backup to firewire, always UNPLUG THE DEVICE when you do an OS upgrade. It sounds unbelievable, but customer support for the disk swears that the OS upgrades “enhance” your firewire firmware, usually for the worse, leading to weird hangs when you write (enough) to the disk.
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