At long last......

......After years of courting disaster......
.....This here machine is finally backed up.
After taking all night to do so.
“I guess I can’t turn off this rig,” I said, as we prepared to go to bed last night (Tuesday, February 1, 2011).
“That would interrupt backup. It’s crunching.”
Months ago my wife and I bought two USB external hard-drives, 500 gig each, for backup.
My wife started backing up her machine, a Windows PC, almost immediately. I had to have time for set-up.
The external hard-drives came with backup software preloaded, but it was unusable in my case. It was for Windows machines, or the old MAC Classic Environment.
My machine is a MAC, and I use OS-X as the operating-system, not the old Apple 9.2.
OS-X apparently already has backup software installed.
It’s called “Time-Machine.”
“No backup disc set up; what’s it gonna be?”
I clicked the external hard-drive, connected to a USB port.
“Non-compliant files on here. Do you wanna format?”
Uh-oh......... I don’t like formatting.
That wipes the entire disc clean.
What if it wipes out something I need?
I consulted a friend who works at Mac Shack, the guy who set up this rig.
“Go ahead,” he said.
I still was leery, so I didn’t for a while.
Finally last night I barged ahead — formatted the external hard-drive.
If formatting vaporized something I needed, it was off to Mac Shack.
“Time-Machine” took over and started backing up this here machine.
Backup was arduously slow. After about an hour it attained one gig; 34 more to go. I would let it back up all night.
When I got up this morning, the blue backup light on my external hard-drive stopped winking at 6:34 a.m.; backup was complete.
Time-Machine was scheduled to back up again at 7:34, but I shut off.

• “We” is me and my wife of 43+ years, “Linda.” She retired as a computer programmer.
• The “hard-drive” is a magnetic storage medium inside a personal computer. It’s capacity is measured in bytes — one megabyte equals 1,000 bytes, one gigabyte (“gig”) equals 1,000 megabytes. The capacity on the hard-drive within this machine (an Apple MacBook Pro laptop) is 500 gigs, rather large.
• “USB” is Universal-Serial-Bus, simple terminals for connecting peripherals (e.g, a printer, a scanner, or in this case an external hard-drive) to a personal-computer.
• “Windows” is Microsoft Windows, their computer operating-system. Most Personal Computers (PC) are Windows machines.
• The current Apple computer operating-system is “OS-X” (OS-10); previous was “9.2.,” a so-called “Classic” operating environment, since it’s old.