Occasionally, we’re astonished to find a Mac user with no backup. More of our lives are stored on our computers: work documents, family photos, music collections, home videos, financial reports. Who can afford to lose it all with a slip of the wrist, a stolen laptop or a stray byte written over irreplaceable data?
Going without a backup is extremely dangerous. Hard drives will fail, mistakes will happen. It’s just a question of when. Modern drives spin over 7,000 revolutions per minute. What will you do when yours finally stops?
Fortunately, with the Mac there’s no excuse. Hourly backup has been an integral part of the Mac OS for many years. It’s called Time Machine, and we strongly urge all our clients to use it. Attach a USB or Firewire hard drive to your Mac and it offers to use it for Time Machine backups. A complete backup of your Mac begins immediately.
Once the first backup is complete, new and changed files are copied every hour while you work. Time Machine retains files you’ve deleted and old versions of documents for months, sometimes years. It’s easy to restore a single file, folder, even an entire computer to any state saved the past.
If a computer is stolen or a drive crashes we can restore the system quickly. Every app, email, photo and file is restored to the way it was less than an hour before the loss. Recovery is usually less than $100, and often saves thousands.
More than one Mac? You can share a large drive with several computers. Moving a drive between Macs isn’t always convenient or consistent. We recommend sharing a backup drive over the network with an Apple AirPort, Time Capsule or Mac file server. With wireless networks, being in the same building as the drive may be all it takes for automatic backups and peace of mind.
