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devmach

Why should i buy every year a new laptop ? even it's free ? every time i buy a laptop , i have to;

- backup my files / projects

- destroy my personal files

- sell my old laptop to someone and hopefully get my money

- copy files to the new laptop

- set personal settings ( wallpaper, mouse speed etc )

- and optionally : get used to new keyboard layout

- hope for a fix if there is a some hardware/design error.

for programmers, i think old but working laptop seems fine to me.

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I used to think backing up was a chore and dreaded moving to a new computer.

after a while I spent a day improving the way I work, all of my code (and my configurations) are backed up to github as I work, I store personal stuff I actually want to keep on dropbox or an external drive

I stopped being afraid of moving computers (or more likely, my current computer dying), transitioning to a new computer would take me in the matter of minutes not days, and I dont have to worry about potentially losing files, now I regularly reformat my computer just to get the "fresh install" feel

Destroying your files is a single step, well-implemented in Mac OS, and you don't even have to do this if you simply install a fresh OS and use the right settings.

Selling your old laptop is easy via Craigslist.

Copying files takes a few minutes with FireWire disk mode.

There is no separate step for "personal settings"; those are copied over when you copy your home directory over.

There is also almost never a new keyboard layout.

There is almost never a major hardware issue, either.

Destroying your files is a single step, well-implemented in Mac OS, and you don't even have to do this if you simply install a fresh OS and use the right settings

I don't think installing a fresh OS will remove personal data sufficiently. But maybe there is a setting to do a secure clean?

There's a secure wipe option. You can crank it up to some absurdly paranoid set of passes, although it takes a day or two to complete at that level given a reasonably large drive.

There is no physical reason to use more than one pass on an HD.

And of course erasing an SSD is near-instant.

My understanding runs counter to your assertion. Why do you say that there's no physical reason to use more than one pass?

There is no way to detect HD contents past the current write. It has never been demonstrated that anyone has done it, and data recovery companies will not recover your disk if you accidentally erase the blocks. The misconception that you can do that comes from a misreading of a paper by Gutmann that only applied to an obsolete disk recording method in the first place.

The reason people use methods other than 1-pass erasing is because of marketing thinking that more passes looks better on the product features. Or because the IT people enjoy buying heavy machinery so they can destroy stuff with it.

A day or two is fine. I had a friend who would go through old donated computers to get data off of them. I think the odds are pretty high that people will try on a given machine you give away.

There is a secure wipe option in the Mac OS X install process.

If you're a responsible programmer, you should be doing the first thing on the list regularly anyway, so that shouldn't be much of a problem.

But backups doesn't solve the other problems on the list.

So my last 2 laptop upgrades I never even booted the new laptop as it was (though I did turn it on to make sure it worked). I took it and my old laptop apart and swapped the disks. Took about 5 minutes each time and I'm rewarded with a computer in exactly the same state as it was before the hardware upgrade. It also leaves the old laptop in a state that's perfect for selling.

For the file issues you can just:

1) Swap in your old hard drive into the new machine

2) Copy hard drive over (dd even) and format

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