I want to apologize to some of my customers, since from a time stand point tasks that took me a certain amount of time to accomplish will be taking me a little longer, as my back up machine is a little slower. The laptop will  be back in a couple days.

This does not effect any record keeping, appointments, email (they are all stored online with the ultra cool people at shootQ).

All of my weddings are also unaffected since I back up each wedding to multiple external hard drives utilizingDrobo, a BeyondRAID storage technology that protects data against a hard disk crash (Drobo.com) one of the externals is also kept in a fireproof safe. (It is also acceptable if your photographer uses an off site online form of data storage)

What happened and what should you know before you upgrade operating systems on your computer?
The purpose of this is not to scare anyone from upgrading but to inform how to upgrade. The folks at Apple explained to me that when Snow Leopard upgrades the system it sends the hard drive into a maximum work mode it starts operating at maximum capacity way beyond the normal operation of the drive. This is what caused the failure. Could the drive have already been in the process of failure, maybe. Could it have kept working had I not upgraded, maybe. But that is no reason to be scared of keeping your system up to date. After a beyond frustrating experience at the Apple Store in Whitehall I called Apple directly who with out any prodding on my part said they would take care of everything (Apple, your the best).

I will say this, and no more, that I will now be doing all my business with Apple online or locally with the killer people over at Double Click Computers whom have also been more than helpful, and are Apple Dealers (rant over)

How to upgrade:
1. Make sure  you have nothing extremely important that needs to utilize the computer. Assume the worst. (for businesses like myself this time does not exist)

2. Back up your data to an external drive like my Drobo. (Check and make sure that it transferred with out error) you should consider doing this anyways, all the time.

3. Back up your system, on a mac I use Time Machine with a Time Capsule. But there are lots of ways to create a disk images to back up your drive. If done correctly you can implant all of the old disk on to the new one like nothing ever happened

4. Allocate time to perform the upgrade, so that you can monitor the process

Hopefully this was helpful, but also remember you can contact apple or a specialist prior to making any changes that you feel uncomfortable with. And I promise that we will be at max capacity churning out the pictures soon.