All entries for Tuesday 27 January 2009

Got Back Up?

Earlier today I was looking at a girl's Apple iBook that contains her only copy of an imminently due essay along with her photos and probably a bunch of other stuff she would hate to lose. This iBook has developed a fault and is no longer usable. (For the Mac savy, yes I did try the usual tricks. This is why I didn't try extracting the harddisk.) Hopefully the harddisk is OK and so a repair service will able to get her access to her files but it is going to cost her time, money, stress, hassle. If she had made a back up she could be working on that essay using another computer whilst her iBook gets sorted out instead of having to decide whether to start re-writing it from scratch now or wait to for someone to dismantle her iBook to get access to her only copy.

A friend of mine once went out on a call and found himself dealing with a woman who ran her business from one computer which had stopped working. She had no back ups of her files so her business was pretty much crippled whilst she waited a couple of days for an engineer to come out to fix her computer. Turned out the part of her computer which had failed was the harddisk. So even though my friend got her computer working again by replacing the harddisk she was still completely screwed because she didn't have any of her files. Apparently she cried a lot.

If you have a computer, be it a laptop or desktop, an Apple or a Dell or whatever, and you do not have a back up of all the files on there that you couldn't bear to lose then you could find yourself being one of those people. If you do not have a back up your files then go to Amazon or your online retailer of choice right now, buy yourself a USB flash drive or an external harddisk, take a copy of those files and make sure you keep making copies regularly, especially after you make important changes. You will never regret doing it, but you may one day severely regret not doing it.

Mike Willis : 27 Jan 2009 19:39 |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem