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
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James Taylor
When I bought an iMac last year, the next thing I did was go and pick up a hefty USB harddrive so that I could avail myself of the Time Machine feature in Leopard. It’s such an excellent solution to maintaining backups.
For years I used to run without any kind of backup but as harddrive capacities have increased and prices have nosedived there is just no excuse not to keep backups these days.
I’d quite like to try a Time Capsule from Apple so I could backup over the LAN, but can’t get over the extortionate pricing! :|
30 Jan 2009, 13:21
Mike Willis
I’ve never used Time Machine myself but it is a great idea. It’s worth bearing in mind though that a backup that sits in the same physical location as what it’s backing up is no use in the event that some sort of disaster affects that location. Or if you get burgled and they pick up your laptop and the backup harddisk you’ve left sitting next to it. Call me paranoid but such thoughts occur to me.
Ideally your back up should be in a different physical location though in the case of home users that is of course generally impractical. I keep the external harddisk I use for back up in a different part of the house to my computer though.
30 Jan 2009, 14:53
James Taylor
You’re absolutely right of course – I backup purely in case of accidental data loss through a failed drive or me doing something stupid. I never gave much thought about being burgled or something like that…
As you say, making the backup device ‘remote’ compared to the computer is difficult unless you want to use a NAS or something – but I don’t want the increased power costs associated with running a device like that 24/7 when I only really need to access it a few hours a day, a few days a week… but then on the flip side of that, just how important is my data to me?
Food for thought.
30 Jan 2009, 16:17
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