Two Things - Super Duper and Noise Canceling Headphones

Shawn / Lesa

I wanted to pass along two things that might be interesting to listeners.

The first relates to Super Duper backups. I am religious in backing up my G5 with two internal Serial ATA drives in Bay 1 and Bay 2, and have a backup process that is run automatically by Super Duper. My G5's main internal/boot drive in Bay 1 was a very small 150 gig drive and has become close to capacity. I decided to update the Serial ATA drive in Bay 1 to a 500 gig one.

I have many external Firewire drives and one that I have a "bootable" backup of my Bay 1 boot drive on, so I assumed it would be an easy replacement, oh no!. Here is the saga and the lesson learned. I was going to just boot from my external drive, shut off my machine, remove the Bay 1 internal drive, replace it with the new drive, reboot and then restore my Bay 1 drive to bootable via Super Duper.

It appears that the only hard drives that are "bootable" are certain chip set Firewire drives, as well as other Internal drives. Super Duper leads you to believe when it does the backup that the drive is bootable. No USB drive can be booted from, nor can most of the other Firewire drives that I have. I have Western Digital drives that have over the years been very dependable and quiet, but because of the chipsets in the drives, they will not be allowed to be booted from in OSX.

I went to the Super Duper forums after several hours of frustration to find this out. Here is what I had to do.

I ended up having to remove my 750 gig Bay 2 drive (filled with Photos), putting the new drive in Bay 2, re-booting, restoring from Bay 1 to Bay 2, and then removing the Bay 1 drive, placing the Bay 2 drive in Bay 1 and then adding back my 750 gig bay 2 drive.

The moral of the story is, make sure you can boot from your backup, BEFORE you need to. It is not enough to have a backup of your boot drive, if the machine can not boot from it.

The second thing is in response to Lesa's discussion (or shopping trip) about headphones from a show several weeks ago. Lesa was looking for a pair of noise canceling headphones, and I did not hear any mention of a pair of headphones that I purchased years ago because of a YML guest, the Futuresonics. I have had the Futuresonics for several years now, and although they do not have the noise canceling technology in them, they serve the same purpose. I have flown over 300,000 miles in the past 4 years, and find that the soft in ear headphones that Futersonics make prevent a substantial portion of the noise from the plane from ever reaching my ears, so there is no need for noise cancellation. They are very comfortable, and unlike those stupid looking can type headphones, these are very discreet, and even during takeoff and landing I keep them in to block out cabin noise. These headphones are used my rock musicians on stage to allow them to save their ears, as well as hear what they are playing. Lesa should give these a try, and you might want to get them back on the show, as I remember they gave a great discount on their headphones the last time they were on.

Charles Silvey