Hard drives crash and burn
It’s inevitable. You will lose all your data unless you regularly backup.
It’s happened to me. There I was, sitting at my computer when whoosh, the hard drive crashed. On my iMac. Can you believe it?
You think restarting will fix the problem. Sometimes it does. This time it didn’t. The only recourse was to spend hundreds of dollars to try and recover the data. And buy a new hard drive.
There are many backup options.
Since then I take every precaution to back up all my data.
- Every project I work on I store in a folder I named “backup”. Clever and informative. Whenever I have chunk of time free I regularly back up all this data onto DVDs and then file them away.
- I have a 1TB external hard drive. Being a Mac person I use Time Machine. I set this up to run a backup every hour. It’s come in handy a few times to rescue lost files.
- I subscribe to Carbonite. It’s an online, off-site storage company, for both Macs and PCs. There are other options, but Carbonite has a free iPhone app where you can access all your online files. It regularly backs up all the data on my hard drive and stores it offline. Then if something happens to my home, external hard drive and backup DVDs, I’m covered. They do have earthquakes in California, you know.
- I also subscribe to MobileMe. Big changes are coming soon, I hear. I use this service to backup my QuickBooks for Mac and Quicken.
- I also use MobileMe to backup my home data, contacts, calendar and mail.
- My music and photos are also backed up online, through Time Machine, on DVDs, Carbonite, iPhone and iPad.
- I use Todo to store all my todos online with the Appigo sync service. I’ve also got all my todos on my iPhone and iPad using the Todo app. If only I would do my todos I wouldn’t need to store them.
- I bought 1Password for my iPhone, iPad and Mac. This stores all my passwords and sensitive info. It’s a great program that asks you if you want to store login info whenever you log into something online.
Am I paranoid about losing my data? You bet. It’s happened. And it’s not unusual.
I highly recommend you look into some form of data backup. Better to be safe than regret losing data or memories permanently.
Also check out How to Backup Your Data & Installation Discs from Gigaom’s Apple Blog.
Have you got backup horror stories? Share them here.
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