Good luck!

While it is in the shop, I worked on my PC. I had my most important files backed-up with Mozy, so I could continue working (until my PC died that is).

It was an interesting exercise: switching from Mac to PC for a week. I managed to get some work done. You can read more about it in my post:
http://zvikico.typepad.com/problog/2008/04/youve-gotta-lov.html
—
Wow Zviki, and I thought I had a bad week with just one crash!

I am glad to read that you will be getting your Mac back with hard drive intact.

Here’s to a better week for both of us!

-Pam

Redundancy is good is good. I use Time Machine to back up constantly to an external hard drive, plus Jungle Disk for daily backups to Amazon’s storage service (so cheap you can’t believe it), plus I use Super Duper to back up weekly to ANOTHER hard drive, making a bootable clone of my MacBook’s startup drive.

I figure the odds of all three failing at once are low. A really important point: make sure one backup doesn’t live at your office. What if the building burns down? Thus things like JungleDisk are great, the data is far away.

I have used Mozy on PCs and loved it, but last time I checked it was in beta for the Mac and it was so bad I gave up. I was never able to complete a backup of my data with it. Maybe they have improved it, and when it’s out of beta I’m sure it will be fabulous like the Windows version. For Windows users I highly recommend it.

If you’re using Parallels (& keeping data there), be wary of one thing – to your Mac, your entire Windows drive looks like a giant data file. So you can’t restore individual files from it, and every time you change anything, Time Machine makes a gigantic backup of the whole file that contains the data that Parallels uses to create the virtual drive.

If you are keeping data there, I’d recommend removing the Parallels files from you Mac backup and running a separate Windows backup in Parallels. Or, do what I do, which is store no data whatsoever there – when I am running a Windows app, it’s accessing data files in the Mac file structure, which are then backup up normally. (If you have Outlook this is basically impossible, but you could use something like Mozy, or run some Win software to back up key files like your Outlook .pst files over into the Mac directories, where your Mac backup would handle them normally.)

WOW, not so good… I’m thankful that with me using a PC I haven’t been fed the lie that macs are just “good to go” and never have problems.

I’ve had a few close run ins… And was backing up my photos to DVD, however I’ve been using a neat tool for backups.

I recommend it to PC folks. http://allwaysync.com/ It’s trial until you use it a ton it’ll yell at you and the upgrade to pro is worth it.

I backup all my photos after a photo shoot however my weak link was remembering to backup the edits, resized photos, and final “for client” files to the second Hard drive. Alwaysync is great because it only backs up the CHANGES, and it’s not in a proprietary Zip style format like what ghost would do.

Thanks for the blog post, I’ll point my mac friends here when they start to get lazy.

~Adam
/AcmePhoto (flickr, twitter, etc)

Nobody appreciates backups until they need them. For years my customers have questioned the need for any backup at all!

Great advice in the posts here, I recommend BOTH an external drive AND and off-site backup service since you can never have too many backups.

The praises of “mozy” are well founded – I use that for all my workstations. Additionally, I use “intronis” for my server. I combine that with external drives on the machines that “matter” which are backed up daily.

The best thing is that once it’s all set up it runs by itself!

Some consider me paranoid, however I’ve had too many disk crashes in my career to be anything else!

As you reflect on this – consider this an inexpensive lesson since you ultimately got your files back from your original disk!

That might not happen next time!

Take care (of your data),

Fred

Thanks you for the nudge – I’ve writing this on my new laptop that I’ve had for a few months now, and have NOT backed up – yikes.

And I have crashed more than one hard drive, so I should now better.

But with a 3 year old, a 7 month old, a home, a husband, and a business, I’m BUSY.

Of course, I wouldn’t have the business without my computer, so I’m backing up right now, both online and to an external drive.

And your dontbealoserlikepam.com cracked me up, too!

Cheers,
Alicia

To date, in 20+ years of computer work, I have never lost a harddrive that had data that was not backed up. But that is mostly dumb luck – because I have gone (remember, I do this for people) months at a time without backing up.

Right now I am synchronizing to my offline service – Pam’s pain, our gain.