Crashes Happen (Even on Macs). So back it up. Here’s 3 ways.
Yes. We hate to admit it, especially to Windows people - and I live in Seattle - there are a lot of them. But crashes do happen. Sometimes they have nothing to do with the Mac OS itself. Ever seen the guy at the airport who is rushing to a flight, gets out of his chair too quickly, and realizes he didn’t zip the part of his briefcase carrying his laptop? I have. Once. And it was like slow motion as the corner of the laptop screen hit the floor, bearing the brunt of the fall. Yea - I had to turn away. It was like watching a predatory chase on the Discovery Channel, where you know how the whole thing is going to end, and you close your eyes to avoid watching.
So enough of the scare tactics. Back up regularly. Here’s three ways you can be the person that says, “don’t worry - everything is okay” as all of the passers-by gaze at you in sympathy.
- Use a shared drive on your corporate network. Most IT managers in big companies (or the hosting company at smaller ones) can help you set up a partition to park your docs, prefs, tunes, photos and everything else on that big Mac hard drive.
- Use an online backup service like Mozy. I’ve been trying this service lately, and it’s really solid. Plus, since you’re likely connected all night, Automator actions can be configured to perform the backup in the middle of the night.
- Use your iPod. Truthfully, it’s pretty hard to fill an 80Gig iPod with tunes - even movies. To use the iPod as a backup drive, click on “Enable Disk Use” from your iPod’s configuration screen in iTunes. Now the iPod can accept any files from your hard drive. Applications such as Backup, included on every Mac, can provide a periodic reminder.
Do your duty. Back it up.
apple reporter, leigh fatzinger, mozy, iTunes, backup, apple, mac, os x
August 1st, 2007 at 1:17 am
My laptop dropped from a table (still in the bag) once and my heart stopped for a few seconds.
It still works but the top left corner of the screen is slightly darker.
Yes, backup, good idea…
September 5th, 2007 at 10:02 am
Good hints for backing up. I use external hard drives to back up. I gotta argue on the filling up an iPod thing though. Mine’s 80% music, plus a few funny videos and it’s full.
Plus, they don’t make a 1.5 TB iPod yet to back up my hard drives. Unless they announce one today~!
Cheers