Audiophobe

I love TimeMachine. It works in the background transparently and has saved me several times. As an added bonus, if the internal drive fails, you can boot off of the TimeMachine disk and finish your work. A few years ago, the disk failed in one of my older MacBooks and I had it back up, restored from the TM backup, and running in about six hours, including the time it took to drive to Best Buy to purchase a new disk. So I was very disappointed that TM backups were taking an extremely long time on my new, space gray, everything-turned-up-to-11, $4k+ MacBookPro with a 2TB SSD -- it would spend an entire day in the Preparing Backup phase and never start the actual backup before I had to eject the backup disk to bring it home. Next day, same thing. As I discovered, its Achilles heel is dealing with lots of small files.  Searching the web, I found a lot of useless info, like use Disk Utility to run "first aid" and "fix permissions" on the backup and internal disks, reform...

The Bell System Tech Journal has moved around to a number of different free and pay-walled sites over the years. I'm glad to see it is now on the Internet Archive . A number of seminal papers were published there. Here are some of my favorites. ​Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications, published in two parts. This is arguably the most influential scientific work of the 20th century. Bell System Technical Journal, 27: 3. July 1948 pp 379-423. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. (Shannon, C.E.) Bell System Technical Journal, 27: 4 October 1948 pp 623-656. A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon, C.E.) Pierce's "less mathematical" book on Shannon's work is also on the Internet Archive. It was the textbook for Bob Krull's course on Info Theory that I took at RPI in 1976, which has had a deep influence on my thinking.   An Introduction to Information Theory Symbols, Signal and Noise by John R. Pierce