Got Backups?

About once a week I get the e-mail:

My hard disk died and I lost everything including all my e-mail. Can you please resend my Poker Copilot license key?

Backing up used to be manual and messy. You had an excuse for not doing it. Today you don’t have an excuse. Hard drives are mechanical. They wear out. The break down. With no warning. You lose everything if you don’t have a backup.

Here is Steve’s simple two-step process for keeping reliable back-ups of your Mac hard drive for little money and little effort.

Step 1: I plead with you to buy yourself a cheap 1 Terabyte external hard drive. Plug it in, turn on Time Machine, and you are done. That takes care of on-site backups.

Step 2: Time Machine doesn’t protect you against burglary or fire, either of which will consume your backup drive as well as your Mac. With today’s always-on high-speed Internet, you can use Jungle Disk for off-site backups. It runs in the background, sending copies of your data offsite. Cheap, reliable, important.

If you have never suffered a hard disk melt-down, you are lucky. Chances are one day you will. I did. Lost a lot of photos. Most of my photos from my adventure crossing the Sahara Desert from Morocco into western Africa. Broke my heart.