Our July newsletter was all about backup. We’re repeating the message this month because we have seen yet more hard drives failing. If you couldn’t start your Mac tomorrow, how much would you be willing to lose?
We recommend each Mac have 2 backups:
One backup should be onsite (located next to your Mac), for quick recovery. Buy any external USB hard drive for your Mac (500GB or more, and it should be empty), plug it into your Mac, then go to the System Preferences and choose Time Machine. Turn it ON and make sure your external drive is selected as the destination disk.
The other backup should be offsite, in case of a fire, flood, theft, or problem with the onsite backup. These days we are recommending CrashPlan; for a monthly fee you can back up as much data as you have to their servers over the internet. That first backup will take a loooong time (weeks, even); subsequent backups only need to do what’s changed, so those will be quicker. It’s pretty easy to set up.
And we can help! We can set up the onsite and offsite backup for you, and in addition, we will notify you when your backups aren’t happening, or when other parts of your computer may be failing. We’ve got yearly subscriptions for both home and business. So let us know if you’d like us to set up a backup system for you.
Don’t wait until it’s too late! Set it up today, or call us to set it up for you.
(September 2011)