Hello Fellow Technophiles,
As is bound to happen with this many nerds under one roof, Star Trek came up again today in a discussion at work. The debate was whether every time a person goes through the teleporter do they die and what is received on the other end is a clone or does the original consciousness somehow survive the matter being broken down into energy and being reconstituted on the other side? I argue for the former and my “proof” is the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Second Chances.” In this story, due to a teleporter malfunction, Commander Riker is duplicated with one version left behind on an uninhabited planet and one version making it back to his ship. After several years, the Riker that was left behind was found and his personality had diverged quite a bit from the other Riker by this point. I say that if duplication is a possibility, then clearly each teleportation is a clone and a destruction of the original as I can’t see how consciousness can be split.
I bring this up partly to give you a behind-the-scenes peek at Small Dog, but also to start a discussion on cloning in the computer world. Fortunately, as there aren’t any conscious computers…yet, this part of the discussion can focus on the technical issues rather than the metaphysical ones. There are a number of ways to clone your computer, but my favorite way is using Carbon Copy Cloner. This program has a simple interface, allows for scheduled cloning, and also has a number of more advanced features for the power user. The primary advantage of a clone is the fact that it can be made bootable. So, if you have a clone on an external drive that is directly connected to the Mac, you can use this drive to start up any other Mac that supports the installed OS, which can potentially get you back up and running faster than migrating all of the data from a Time Machine backup. This can also be your own computer, in the case of a failed hard drive, but an otherwise functional computer.
Of course, like Riker, if the clone is out-of-date, we can get a divergence in the data set. If you make changes to the clone, and then go back to work on your own machine, you need to replace any changed files from the clone back to the original computer, and any changes made to the original computer since the time of the clone will not be on the clone. If you have made different changes to the same file there is no easy way to reconcile the two other than manually changing whichever one is closer to the intended state.
Next time, I will use a tenuous Star Trek metaphor to compare Time Machine to “actual” time travel. Stay tuned!