I have been thoroughly spooked by stories of the potentially limited shelf-life of iBook hard drives, as I have 2,000 songs (6GB) in iTunes. What's the best way to back up these files? Yours in vague terror, Jamie Milne
All hard drives fail eventually, and even if they didn't, your PC could fail in a different way, or be stolen, so back-ups are essential. The obvious option is to burn audio CDs of the tracks, which also removes the iTunes copy protection. This is pretty secure, but takes time. You can also back up your songs to CD or DVD as data files: Apple offers step-by-step instructions, or see the account at One Digital Life.
It's quicker and more convenient to back up to an external USB or FireWire drive, trusting to luck that two hard drives don't fail at the same time. External drives are cheap - I just bought a 320GB model for £130.
You could buy an iPod to provide a backup, and also provide music on the move. However, if your iBook fails, the iPod will not want to move your music back to what it will see as a different computer. There are ways round that, including the Backstage program from Widgetfab.com; the free but Mac only Senuti (www.fadingred.org/senuti/); and CopyPod.
Incidentally, the G3 iBook has a relatively poor record for reliability. A MacInTouch.com survey of more than 10,000 notebooks found that between 49% and 74% of G3 iBooks needed repairs, mainly due to motherboard problems. However, the G4 model has a much better record. You can check yours at http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/laptops.html#results.
