As a couple of my clients are aware, my mac decided to eat it’s own hard drive on Friday of last week – unfortunately this means I don’t have a machine to work on for a week!
Like a fool I’ve never been that great at backing up my files, especially since I started using a mac, since they are bulletproof and never go wrong, ever! Haha Oh dear. Anyway, the nice people at MCC Chester have taken my machine in for repair, unfortunately the data stored on the hard drive isn’t covered by the warranty, so I also have to pay £140 to get the data recovered – which feels wonderful.
As a result I have promised to also spend money on a shiny new toy. Enter another great mac invention, the time capsule. This is basically a glorified hard drive, it’s totally wireless and works with a program included in the apple OS called Time Machine. This clever little tool regularly and automatically backs up your system, that way if your machine’s hard drive fails you can hit a button and it’ll restore it to where it was before. Great eh? If only I’d bought one last week!
We live and learn!
For anyone who’s interested I may just write a tutorial/walkthrough for setting up Time Machine with the Time Capsule. Comment if that would benefit anyone.
You can find out more about the Time Capsule and Time Machine software here: http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/
Back-up is only proper back up if it’s remote back-up - for instance if your office burns down your main machine AND your external hard drive are going to go down in ashes aren’t they? So you aren’t really backed up properly still.
The only way an external hard drive is good enough back-up, is if you take it ‘off site’ each day, so you have your files in two separate locations every day.
I have something like about 300 client project files I can’t afford to loose and so I have an external drive such as your own, a good quality laptop for temporary working on if my main machine fries, which contains most of the files also, and then I use a remote back up service on top.
I’ve had a machine fry on me 2-3 times now, so I’m practically a back-up zealot
The remote back up service I use is very good I’ve found - http://www.mozy.com. Very quick and easy to use.
I’d also recommend keeping a written storage of all your passwords and usernames for all your vital services and the url of all the places you need to go to re-download any software you rely on.
Basically what is required is a list/plan of action in the event of a machine frying that tells you what to re-install from disks and what to reinstall online and all the passwords relating to this. In paper format, so it doesn’t fry along with the machine. And also a digital format - that goes to your remote back up service.
My process has become very slick now, the last time my machine fried, I was up and running again in just two hours and it was much less painful and stressful than the first two times
I never thought about the possibility of a fire wiping the lot out, I had considered a remote backup service before but not for that reason. I was more worried about the hard drive just mangling itself whilst on a path of self destruction. Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out now