You remember this image (above) which stared in an episode of the Sex and the City TV series… You know, when Carrie Bradshaw turns on her Mac laptop and gets the ‘Sad Mac’ face and then the ‘bomb’ icon, indicating her hard drive had died and gone to ‘Mac heaven’. Disaster. Well, it was for her as she had never backed up her work. For those of you, who watched that episode when it aired (way back when), I hope you learned through her mistake. I sure did!
Backing up weekly has been my mantra ever since. I have a calendar event scheduled weekly to manually back up and have been doing it for years. It didn’t however, stop my heart almost caving in when my MacBook Pro (circa 2008 model) decided to give up the ghost last week. Hence, no weekly post. So, the past week has been a blur setting up a new laptop (thanks to a spare I had – I know, who has a spare laptop lying around you might ask…) and my Time Machine back up of my entire computer was simply loaded onto it, including my settings. Now, it wasn’t as simple as that, but with the help from the guys at the Apple Store’s Genius Bar, a bit of internet research and a few prayers I only had a couple of days down time. What a relief!
When your computer is a large part or the central part of your livelihood, you need to have contingencies in place and backing up regularly is a minimum. I’m looking into getting a Time Capsule now to back up wirelessly over my network every hour, automatically.
When it comes to technology you need to respect it, treat it well and you can’t be complacent, lazy or procrastinate. If you haven’t been backing up, you need to start doing it today!