I've Upgraded my Laptop

This spring I have upgraded my laptop and have gone through the process slowly. Transfering things was easy but getting all the software sorted was less easy. If you've done this before, you know what I'm talking about. 

The critical bit is my backup scheme. I use a program called CrashPlan that does an excellent job of backing up my files and (most importantly) photos to both local drives and the cloud. But is slow to respond to a complete backup of this multi-terabyte job. That and there were issues of course. But I can now report that all is safely in the cloud and on the external drives I drag with we while we travel.

You might wonder why I don't just backup to the cloud and not bother with the external drives. Well, I cannot guarantee that we will always have a sufficiently fast internet connection nor that our hosts have a monthly plan that will provide enough gigabytes to make this possible. We ran into this a lot in Australia. So I carry external drives both for the images and their backup so i can disable the cloud backup when necessary.

So, my upgrade has taken me from a macbook I bought in 2015 to a new M1 macbook pro. I can certainly tell the difference in lots of ways: The display is higher resolution, the computer is noticeably faster (of course), I have more memory so things complain less, and the screen is just a little bigger (13" -> 14"). All told, I'm happy and ready for a summer of travel and exploration.

Finally, in the past the external drives just sort of hung from the computer and made everything fragile and prone to disrupted connections. I have solved this problem as well by sawing out a board on which to set the computer. This has a very basic cable management system to hold the cables and extra space behind the monitor to set the externals drives. Now all is good. Now, I have a fast computer I can travel with and set on my lap without fear of disconnecting anything. Life is good.