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This newsletter is dedicated to the idea of backing up your computer. It has never been easier so there is little excuse to not be proactive and backup. You'll need to have Leopard or Snow Leopard running on your Mac to make it easy. If you don't have either of these flavors of the Mac operating system don't fret, there are ways to backup your Mac. It's just not as easy (see the end of this newsletter).
Both Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6) have Apple's Time Machine software pre-installed. What you need to provide is an external hard drive (in most cases) so that Time Machine has a place to store your computer's information. Here's what Apple's website says about Time Machine: "Never again worry about losing your digital files. Time Machine automatically saves up-to-date copies of everything on your Mac — photos, music, videos, documents, applications, and settings. If you ever have the need, you can easily go back in time to recover anything." Now it's time to separate marketing from reality. Sure if all goes perfectly the preceeding Apple statement will ring true and all will be well. The problem with the statement is the word automatically. How people tend to read that word is once the intitial setup of the external hard drive is done you never have to check anything or worry that the backup is actually working. This line of thinking will lead us down a path that ends with data loss. Here's the problem, nothing is 100% perfect and if you've used your computer you will have experienced its imperfections. Don't forget, computers are made by humans, need I say more.
Before we talk about how to set up an external drive to be your backup and how to check to make sure it's working properly, let's explore why you might need a backup. Many people at the first mention of a backup profess that they don't need one because they don't have anything on their computer worth backing up. Perhaps this is true for a small minority of users but it's not true for most of our clients. Let's look at what you have on your Mac that might be worth saving. Photos would be the first thing I would think you'd want to save. If you have small children you might only have digital pictures of them and they are probably on your Mac and maybe nowhere else. A brief cautionary tale: A couple, let's call them Billy & Kim, have 3 small children. Their Mac had every image of their children's life from birth to present. Their hard drive failed and they almost lost all of these memories. The only solution to save the marriage and the pictures was to send the Mac's hard drive out to DriveSavers in California and spend $2500 to recover the data. No trip to Disney World that year.
So you say you don't have photos on your Mac. Well you probably have addresses and emails you might want to have backed up. Do you ever create documents, spreadsheets, pdf's or anything you might not want to have to recreate if your hard drive fails? Do you have music on your computer? Even if you've never bought a song from iTunes you still had to take the time to load your CDs into the Mac. Do you want to load all those CDs again? Maybe you answer no to everything-nothing is that important and you don't want to deal with a backup. That's, of course, fine and best of luck, but let me offer one last scenario to entice you/push you/help you to see the light. Have you installed programs on your Mac since you bought it? If so, do you know where the discs are and what the serial numbers are for the installations? With a Time Machine backup you needn't locate and re-install those programs. The backup will restore all of those applications and your data with little effort.
Here's how to get started and also how to make sure the backup you are relying on is working properly. The first step is to get an external hard drive. There are many flavors: USB, Firewire or Apple's Wireless Time Capsule. If you need help making a decision we are here to help. Just drop us an email at macs@twinpeaksgeeks.com.
Now we'll presume you've decided a backup is a good idea and you've purchased a backup hard drive. If this is true you are almost the proud owner of a backup of your computer. When you plug in the external hard drive you should see a message like the one below:
You will see a different name, not "The dump", when you connect up the drive you've purchased. It might say LaCie, or Maxtor or whatever the brand of hard drive is called. Once you determine that Time Machine is looking at the correct drive you need to click on the 'Use as Backup Disk' button and Time Machine will begin to backup your computer. The intitial backup will take some time. The amount of time depends on how much stuff is on your computer. After the initial backup Time Machine should backup quickly. The reason it's quicker after the first backup is that Time Machine is only backing up what has changed or been added since the initial backup.
If you don't happen to see the window that comes up asking whether you'd like to use the external drive you just plugged in, don't worry. Click on the Apple at the top left of the screen and choose System Preferences. Once you are there click on the Time Machine icon. The picture below illustrates how it should look. Click 'ON' and then click the "Select Backup Disk..." button on the right. After doing this you'll have a window that should allow you to select the external drive that is connected to the computer. The drive should be listed on the left side of the window that comes up.
After you get your first backup to the external drive you are officially ahead of the game. You now have one copy of your computer's information somewhere other than on the computer's hard drive.
Now let's say it's two weeks later and you want to see (and you should) if the backup is working properly. Have a look at the picture below:
You see the arrow going counter-clockwise at the top of the picture? You'll find the icon at the top right of your computer screen, up by the clock. If you click on it you will see, hopefully, a 'latest backup' that is fairly recent. Time Machine should be backing up hourly when the computer is on. If you see 'Delayed' or 'Failed' don't panic just choose the 'Back Up Now' selection from the list and see if it works after doing that. If it doesn't start backing up after manually initiating the back up give us or Apple a call to see what can be done.
Keep in mind that if you haven't backed up in a long time it will take Time Machine some time (5, 10, 15 minutes) before it will get started with the backup. If, for whatever reason, you haven't backed up recently Time Machine will also put a message onscreen telling you you are a bad person. No, it doesn't really say this but it will remind you it has been a number of days, weeks or months since your last backup.
One last thing about the backup. If you get the message that the backup has failed or that you haven't backed up in a long time, do this. Check the cable going into the computer from the hard drive and check that the power to the drive is on. If all seems well yet the drive won't show up on the computer try unplugging and replugging the cables. Often it's the simplest solution we overlook.
What if you don't have Time Machine? You can still back up your computer if your don't have Leopard or Snow Leopard. A couple of solutions for backing up pre-Leopard Macs are Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper.
There are also many online (off-site) backup solutions you can explore. A few companies we are testing now are Carbonite, Mozy and Backjack-check them out and see if they meet your needs for backing up your computer away from your home or office. Off-site backups are also a good idea in addition to using Time Machine for your on-site backup.
Remember that we are here to help you if you need. |
