Once the installation was finished, I began the process of copying data from the Mac mini and from my external USB drive onto the MacBook Pro. I started with the most important stuff--the apps I needed to turn the MacBook Pro into a usable work machine. I'm copying the other data over section by section; as I write these words, nine minutes remain on the transfer of my 80GB Music folder.

And as I'd hoped, the SSD is a delight. This is old news to anyone with an SSD already, but--wow. My MacBook Pro starts up and is usable in around 15 seconds. Apps launch instantly. It's almost enough to motivate me to write 13F a thank-you note. Almost.

All told, this could have been a lot worse. As I tell my friends and family, it's always a question of when, not if, a given hard drive will fail; it pains me how often folks neglect to ensure that they have current, reliable backups. Setting it up can be a tiny hassle, but it's so worth it: I never once feared catastrophe when my MacBook Pro's drive went belly up. I knew that, worst case, I'd lose a small amount of data. My most precious data--photos and videos of my family, everything I've ever written--were (and are!) safely backed up in multiple places.

I was especially delighted by how great Dropbox-sync is for desktop Mac apps. Some Mac apps can use Dropbox to sync your preferences, settings, and other files--and it worked out great for me: BBEdit reopened on my new hard drive looking exactly as I'd left it on the old one, with all the same open documents, including ones I hadn't saved manually. Amazing. TextExpander and 1Password both noted that I had data available on Dropbox and synced my setups for those apps, too. Since I started out on the new hard drive only by copying over my old apps, getting immediate access to those apps' data was a treat.