My iMac is well and truly dead - again. I'm not sure what the problem is this time, but it appears to be different than the last time.  I suspect the logic board went bad.  I don't have Apple Care, so this time I decided to just buy a new iMac.  I did end up buying a hackintosh earlier as a backup machine, but while it does work it's not quite the same thing.

I ended up buying a slightly older upgraded model than the most recent.  I saved a couple hundred bucks and got a machine that actually has a few better specs than more recent stock models.  I also bought Apple Care this time around.  Hopefully the last machine was just a lemon and I won't need the support, but just in case...

One thing I did after the previous time my iMac died was to buy an external hard drive and set it up with Time Machine.  I really like Time Machine.  It seems to work very well.  Not only is it good for backing up data in case of a catastrophe, it is also useful for handling little mistakes like when you accidentally delete the wrong file(s).  It has also been very handy for going back and looking at old versions of files to see what has changed.  In that respect it's like revision control software - though not quite as easy to use.

I am very glad I set up Time Machine, too.  When my iMac died this time I was right in the middle of working on a big project.  After I bought the new iMac I hooked the Time Machine hard drive up and reinstalled everything from the drive.  It was automatic and it worked flawlessly.  I only lost about an hour of work - the time between when the last backup had run and when the iMac died.