Why backup is more important now than ever and how to do it inexpensively.
/Whenever we sell a Mac, we always ask if the customer would like a new backup drive to protect all their data. Sadly, less than half our customers take us up on that opportunity. Often, they question the need spend even the extra money on a backup when they are getting a brand new Mac. Often, they are shocked when I explain that newer Macs are more at peril than previous computers for massive and catastrophic data loss.
New Macs have fewer components than older computers: gone are the days when the “drive” was its own part. Today, the storage is permanently soldered to the main logic board. This has created a substantial boom in performance quality, but the flip side is that if something else fails, your ability to access your data is very likely gone. Spill water on your Mac? Chances are, it will never start again, and regardless of whether the chips which store your data were submerged or not, they will not operate. Professional data recovery is possible, and our friends at DriveSavers have worked miracles for our customers, but they charge $2500-3500 for that service! All of that could have been protected and avoided with a simple $89 external drive.
Also gone are the days of degraded performance as a “tell” that your drive was about to fail. Going back to the Jurassic days of 2012 or earlier, most Macs had spinning hard drives which would often (not always, but often) begin to slow as they made their march to failure. Today’s Solid State Drives don’t usually do that. If they fail (rare, but certainly possible), they will work perfectly one moment and be completely dead the next. Again, DriveSavers may be able to assist for a few thousand dollars, or for a whopping $89 you can never worry.
Macs make the backup process easy. They all come with software called “Time Machine” which manages the backup. All you need is a drive of sufficient capacity. It’s both the simplicity and low cost of having a backup that’s the irony. A week doesn’t go by that we don’t have a customer in our office in tears because they lost everything. Don’t let this happen to you! (And while we love iCloud: on the Mac, iCloud is not a full backup; if you don’t have a full Time Machine backup, you’re not fully backed up safely).
The more important your data is to you, the more places you want to have it. While one backup drive is good, two are even better: our best recommendation for complete data protection is having one primary and one secondary Time Machine backup drive. For complete safety, keep the primary on-site and the secondary off-site. Swap them at an interval which makes sense for you (every 2 months works well for me.) Additionally, we also recommend and use Backblaze, an online cloud backup service. Backblaze is only $6 per month for unlimited storage. It’s real worst-case scenario stuff because you never want to have to use it, but it’s there just in case. Backblaze is data only so it, like iCloud, is not a true full backup, but a supplement to a Time Machine backup. There are other use-cases for complex backup such as network backup, and we can help with that too, but: for most users, a whopping $89 will save them from ever having to ponder just how much those photos of their family are really worth.
