For recovery, I’ve found a good thing to have is a spare firewire drive – just boot off the drive with cmd+opt+shift+del and back up your hard drive. Another indespensible tool is Alsoft’s DiskWarrior. I maintain about 400 Macs, and I use both on a regular basis for troubleshooting and maintenance.

For large copying actions, I’ve found just about the only thing you can do with a broken OS X install is copy things in very small batches. An OS X install that’s in good working shape should be able to copy a large amount of data without a hitch – I regularly back up users’ entire hard disks to my firewire drive prior to re-imaging their computers. Typical backup size is ~70k+ files and 30-50GB of data, and I very rarely see any hiccups while copying.

As far as downloading files goes, I keep a folder on my desktop as my system-wide target download directory – that way, I don’t have junk constantly littering my work space. I’ve also titled the folder ‘To Be Sorted,’ so seeing it prompts me to take care of the files that are accumulating in it.

In your case, I’d say DiskWarrior probably would have saved you some grief – it sounds like a damaged volume wrapper or other filesystem error.

RAM – Spot on, especially since Macs switched to DDR. It wasn’t as big an issue when they still used SDRAM; now, I really see a marked increase in crash rates with non-Apple RAM installed in newer machines.

In any case, while I agree the Finder does occasionally leave something to be desired, a well-tuned OS X system shouldn’t crash nearly as often as it has for you – I’ve seen perhaps two kernel panics in the past year, and both were caused by faulty hardware. You might want to run the Hardware Test disc that came with your Mac and make sure everything is peachy.

Best,

Brandon