This morning my new MacBook Pro was working it’s daily duties. A lunchtime later and the hard drive was not booting. It’s completely dead and I’ve lost everything on the drive! Thankfully I was working off a server in the morning and the last time I backed up was yesterday.

So, ask yourself how much bother it would cause if suddenly your Mac or PC hard drive suddenly stopped working? If the answer is lots – then you’re not backing up correctly.

I’ve been using the wonderful ChronoSync for a few years now and it’s got me out of quite a few jams – including todays. Think of it as a iSync for huge amounts of data, you specify the folders you want to synchronise and ChronoSync simply keeps the latest files from each folder. You can even specify older or deleted files to be archived for extra safety. My daily backup consists of syncing 65GB of data in 3 minutes.

For just £25 it’s worth every penny. ChronoSync

Freehand Icon to match your new CS4 range of apps. Download here

BUG #5
If you’ve freshly installed Apple Snow Leopard (10.6) and Freehand won’t even open – then this will help you. The new OS can’t handle the older Activation/Registration panel Freehand uses on first launch.

Therefore you need to copy over your Registration file from an older Leopard machine.

1) Open Freehand on Leopard (OS 10.5)
2) Goto > Help > Transfer my licence – Agree
3) Open Freehand again > Activate – And Quit
4) Copy your registration file from /Library/Application Support/Macromedia/ into the equivalent Snow Leopard folder. Open Freehand on Snow Leopard.

If the above doesnt work for you – you’ll need a Volume Licence Serial. (This is not the preferred solution but Adobe has left the Freehand user no option if they do not issue maintenance updates to Freehand)

1) Download this ZIP
2) Copy the registration file to /Library/Application Support/Macromedia/ in Snow Leopard. Open Freehand.

Snow Leopard arrived yesterday. I’ve installed this on my spare MacBook for testing purposes and thankfully not yet on my work MacBook. With some further twitter research, it appears I’m not alone. Adobe is actively working with Apple to fix the below bugs – but if I were you, hold off updating for the moment.

BUG #1
Firefox 3.x crashes when using it’s download manager. specifically Adobe’s Software updates.
Solution – Use Safari until an update from Apple

BUG #2
New Apple font ‘Menlo’ crashes CS4 when you attempt to use it.
Solution – Delete this font

BUG #3
Unable to drag images from Safari directly into another application in the Dock. Be it Photoshop, Word or other.
Solution – Wait for update from Apple

BUG #4
CS4 Photoshop crashes particularly during Open and Save operations. CS3 also crashes if you try opening CS4 created files.
Solution – Wait for Apple update.