Why should you backup?

Richard Charpentier Macintosh, Notes from Rich, Tech Tips 10 Comments

You could just ask Sadira.  She’ll tell you all about it.  Backups are more important than you’ll ever know.

A week ago Sadira called me quickly in the morning to say her system wasn’t booting up.  It was making a beep sound and there was some clicking from the hard drive.  That was the whole response from the system.  Not a good sign!

Fortunately Sadira did some things to protect herself from the get go.  When she bought her Macbook she also bought the Apple Care protection plan.  Her Apple Care offered her a 3 year extended warranty.  Nice!

She also moved a large block of her photography and all of her ITunes to external hard drives.  She got that idea from me.  I’ve got more external hard drives than most small tech stores offer for sale in this town.  Yup, a lot of backup drives!

Sadira brought her machine to the local Apple Reseller, Argosy West, last week.  Argosy told her that she was covered by her Apple Care, and that most likely her hard drive had failed.  What a bummer.  But she had several positives still.  ITunes and tons of photos were safe.  Recent photos were on the Mac and not backed up, but she still had the bulk of the data she cared about.

Finally, after the Apple Tech returned from vacation he assessed her laptop, found the drive was toast, and replaced the drive.  Over the past two days we’ve been putting her machine back to a state close to what she had.  We also took one extra step……we loaded Lepoard (the new version of Mac OSX).  Why go to Lepoard?

Simple, Lepoard has an automatic backup program called Time Machine.  That was one of the first things I set up for her when we booted up her computer.  Time Machine is a “Set it and Forget it” program.  It does the work for you.

Now I ask you……Have you backed up lately?

Comments 10

  1. Post
    Author

    Hooray, we reached someone today!

    Sadira has had quite the time with electronics over the past week. I’m looking forward to her blog when she posts, as we’ll get quite the story….

  2. Is this the same Sadira that also called to tell you her cash register broke, along with the hair dryer? (well, not all at the same time…but sheesh! Makes a gal not want to drive!) (or leave the house)

    Thank you so much for all of your advice, help and invites to spend a lot of extra time with you lately 😉 it has made all of this crazy computerish drama more bearable…Thank you also for investing in Lepoard with me…I am so excited that I will be further protected from now on…Thank you also for all the past help setting up the drives, showing me how to use them, and talking me into buying both the Mac and the Apple Care…I’m just thrilled that I only lost what I did…

    And the rest? Well…the rest is just going to take me about as much time as it did when I was first familliarizing myself with this system…thank goodness for 2 days off in a row!

  3. I backup weekly and I actually have 4 hard drives that I rotate different sets of data. I don’t trust any hard drive, even back up drives.

    You can never have too many backups, I say. And in my business, I advise every single customer on why it’s so important.

    It really is odd that we, as society, don’t trust many things, yet for some reason, we feel hard drives are forever?

  4. OOoooo, I would love to say I have a solid backup strategy…… but I’d be lying.

    The home computer has a mirrored raid, but that is it. Should both drives decide to go down, I’d lose it all. Then again I stopped archiving my raw files, and only half-heartedly archive my jpegs. Bad IT guy…. BAD IT GUY!

  5. Post
    Author

    Lars, I’m with you. Sitting on my dining room table in the Airstream are 2 identical MyBook Drives. One has my live photo database, my Itunes, and documents. The other has an exact copy of the first.

    Below the dinette is another drive. Lacie. It too is a 500GB drive, and once a month it is turned on to backup the backup drive.

    Finally, there is a portable Firewire Lacie that gets hooked up each week to create a Bootable backup of the Macbook Pro. There’s one other Lacie that floats around between my other computers.

    Similar backup strategy at the gallery now as well!

    Sadira, I’m glad to help you. I think we’ve got all the bases covered now in the event of a catastrophic failure. I’m still so surprised that the Mac’s hard drive played the toasty game, but glad you had Apple Care on it. It only takes one failure to make such service plans massively pay off!

  6. Post
    Author

    Tombo, I’m shocked and dismayed! Somebody should drum you out of the IT guy circle!

    Backup young man, backup!

    Not archiving your RAW files??? Oh, I just can’t think about it any more!

  7. If I’m being honest, I really just don’t take anything on my computer that seriously. There is nothing on any of my computers that I would be heartbroken to lose. 🙂

    Should I ever do something ‘professional’, then I would feel the need to start backing things up properly.

    The sad thing is that I’ve probably got a terabyte’s worth of spare drives sitting on my desk, so it really is just laziness. 🙂

  8. Backup is good. We have 8 external drives here. We use TimeMachine. Our “digital valuables” are on RAID 0 external drives.
    I’m been a computer programmer for the past 30 years, so I will add one important point about backups: If you have not tested your backups by restoring files and testing them, you DO NOT have a backup!!!

  9. Be sure to look into a Drobo. Its an amazing backup solution using Linux and RAID concept. Its a little pricey but its an elegant solution.

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