It's always fun when you stumble on a solution to a problem, but even more fun when you stumble on a solution to two problems. I have an external hard drive that has two partitions that mirrors my main hard drive every other day (so I have two backups staggered by a day), and that's working nifty for me. The problem is that they've been stuck on my desktop, which takes up desktop space (not that I have a packed desktop anyway... it's the principle of it- I like clean). My other, more real problem, is that in certain areas OS X scans hard drives for apps. IE, when I have a file on my desktop and I want to open it with another app, I right click -> open with, and then select the app. The problem is that OS X scans for other apps on my drives, so it spins up my external hard drive which takes 3-4 seconds of my time.
I was randomly googling around and found that if you unmount your drive or partitions in Disk Utility, it'll remove them from your desktop and will solve the scan-and-spin delay I had, too. The additional bonus is that it appears that disk backup software can smartly handle this- Synk, my preferred backup solution crafted by a couple of fellow Carnegie Mellon students, is among those apps that can do it (SuperDuper can apparently handle this just fine too). Synk is scheduled to do my backups in the wee hours of the morning, so it now automagically mounts the correct partition, backs up to it, and unmounts it so I'm ready to go when I wake up in the morning.
I love technology.
My friend recently got his MacBook zapped by a glass of water. It looks to be a fairly total loss- must have been a short inside of it somewhere (the MagSafe connector doesn't light up when plugged in, and the battery doesn't light up either).
Luckily, I was able to help out some tonight, and it ended up being pretty painless. He brought over his hard drive and I swapped mine out for his. Fortunately for him, the hard drive seemed unaffected, and we were able to make a full backup of it. This is the point where I really enjoy OS X. He didn't have an external hard drive to back up on, so we just plugged in his iPod, reformatted it, and then clicked "restore" within Disk Utility. That way you can basically make mirror the hard drive to another. It worked great, and he should have a clean backup of all of his data for the next time he needs it.
I know through this process you can make a bootable drive, too, although I don't think his iPod was made bootable in our case. But that would be another great way to do it- mirror your hard drive to an external drive and then you can boot right off of that drive like nothing happened. From that point you can use Apple's migration software to pull all of your settings onto a new Mac, or you can just copy that drive again to a different Mac and you're back to where you're started. Nifty stuff.