About a year ago my personal workflow was based upon a desktop at the office, another (more or less identical) desktop at home, and a laptop for all other cases. While that worked pretty good, I just wondered if maybe I could make my world a bit simpler. My road schedule has picked up quite a bit as Appistry has gained customers and overall market traction (a very good thing!), but that was turning the process of keeping three separate machines current more trouble than it was worth.

So I chucked all three (with various flavors of xp), and picked up a single macbook pro (15", merom generation). So how do things look a year later?

Very nice.

Simple, yet very capable. Not much more to lug around than before, and I have all of my essential non-cloud context with me at all times.

I've upgrade to a 7200 rpm drive (160 gb) and 3 gb, leopard and the newest parallels build. Office 2007 on XP for that sort of stuff. I kept a second display and a wireless keyboard / mouse set for use when docked at the office and home, and an esata card with a few commodity drives and enclosures at home for my serious-amateur photography etc.

About the only thing that was bugging me was the need for a clean backup mechanism. Yes we have all sorts of enterprise backups which work well, yes I can use cloud storage (with it's own set of security / reliability concerns etc.), but there's nothing like having a complete backup of my most most crucial stuff exactly where I can see it.

So I put together a commodity enclosure (the little ministack v3 tucked underneath the laptop stand) with a 1 tb drive and turned on Time Machine.

Cool.

Did a few experiments with deleting files, picking them up from old time machine snapshots, etc., & it was all very obvious. Evening ignoring the thick dose of canonical eye-candy (which I do like, btw), the time machine interface is just so clean. And obvious.

Being especially allergic to losing stuff, and aware that there are folks complaining about some TM flakiness, I have yet another backup as well.

SuperDuper is the Perfect Complement

I'm also a big fan of SuperDuper , and I agree with the developer (Dave Nanian) that they really solve two different problems. So I partitioned the drive with a small partition that will be a bootable clone of the laptop's drive (manual for now, will be created and maintained by superduper once the leopard-compatible update arrives!), and the rest (about 750 gb) is a pool for time machine.

We'll see how long this setup lasts, but I'm guessing it may have some durability.