Woodsman wrote:
. . .
By the way, they replaced only the TC unit itself with a new one. It had been shipped in a plain brown box with nothing else, not the retail packaging.
That's probably a refurbished unit.
Both the AppleCare rep and all the employees at the Store were professional and courteous. When you have to use AC, its always a first class experience.
Maybe not always, but most of the time. Apple always gets the highest marks for customer service. 🙂
As I type this, Time Machine is creating a new backup.
Great!
I'm thinking rather than set it on auto-pilot, I may make manual backups every couple of days. I really don't need anything more frequent than that. Perhaps the constant churn of the hourly backups (when the iMac is on) is a contributing factor to the TC hard drive's demise. All's well that ends well.
That's really not a good idea. Disk drives are made to be used, and Time Machine backups are less stressful than most other uses of a drive, since it's idle most of the time, and not trying to do several things at once.
The great thing about the hourly backups is, when you accidentally change or delete the wrong file (like doing a "Save" when you should have done "Save As"), or something turns up corrupted, you've got an excellent chance of recovering a previous version.
And it's far too easy to forget to do backups manually, and find yourself 3 or 4 days behind (or worse) when something awful happens to your Mac.
Anyhow, glad it's sorted out, and thanks for the feedback.