I received an e-mail this morning from Seth, who was having difficulty getting his initial Time Machine backup completed. Seth graciously agreed to having his question posted here in another edition of Aaron Answers. Below is his question and after the break is my response.

Hi Aaron,

I really appreciate your blog, and wonder if you'd be willing to answer a Time Machine question i've run into. My old backup HD failed, so I bought a new 2T Iomega eGo desktop HD. Partitioned it into 3 partitions, including a 1.1T partition for my time machine backup. All seems to be working fine, except that the backup is too slow to get done unless I leave the computer running for 3-4 days, which I can't do as it's a laptop and I use it all the time. After the first night (8 hours of so) it had only done 20 Gb (out of my 400 Gb). After the second night, it did about 120 Gb. i don't know if I just need to find a 4-day window when I can leave my laptop backing up or if something is wrong with the software. I'm using the new USB2 cord, and it works nice and fast for manually backing up video files etc to other partitions in the drive. The drive seems to work quite fast. If you're able to offer any advice, that would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks, Seth

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I'm not a designer but I definitely consider myself a thinker, strategist, and decision maker. All of these roles have relevance in Scott Stevenson's blog post Measuring the Design Process. After posting a link to Scott's blog post on FriendFeed Deke Smith and I started discussing our thoughts in Facebook comments. The discussion got interesting so I decided to move it here in case others want to chime in. Here's where we are so far, feel free to post your own thoughts in the comments.

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I receive questions from time-to-time from folks reading my blog entries or working through my tutorials and typically these don't wind up as blog posts themselves. But they should. And to help with my goal of increasing my blog post count for 2009 I'm going to start blogging these more. Since everyone is doing the "Ask Bob" thing I thought I'd veer from the norm and put these types of posts into a new category called Aaron Answers. To begin the category of posts here's a few questions from Irv concerning my ColdFusion 7 Secure Login tutorial.

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