Software

Our Macs come with lots of software, so much that for quite a few of us we will never need to purchase any other software to meet our needs.  In this section, we’ll talk about some other applications that the MacGeezers use.  We’ll make recommendations based only upon software we use ourselves.

Backup

Our first recommendation is for backup software.  If you are not regularly backing up your Mac, then you are essentially saying “..what I have on my computer is not important to me”.  There are so many ways that something can go wrong and we lose all the information on our Macs, that to not backup is really playing Russian Roulette.  In the old days(since we’re geezers, we remember well those days) to backup our computers was a pain in the neck.  We had to backup to floppy disks or more recently CD’s and DVD’s.  While we can still backup to CD’s and DVD’s, the size of the hard drives in our computers makes that an ardous task at best.  So our first recommendation is to buy yourself and external hard drive.  If you have an Intel Mac it can have a USB or Firewire interface, but if you’re running a PowerPC based Mac you should look for a Fireware interface.  While both flavors of Macs can use either type of drive, the PowerPC Macs cannot boot from an external USB drive.  So what size drive should you get?  Well that’s a loaded question, but a good rule of thumb is an external drive that is at least as big as your internal drive and preferably twice as big. So click on the “Backup” link above and we’ll talk about what we believe to be the two best solutions. Here’s a link to some external hard drives we use and like