Saving Your Mac Data Correctly

This article will briefly explain how to properly use an external back up drive with your computer. So often, my company gets a call with someone saying they had ALL of their information on a back up drive and it crashed. Unfortunately, when a back up drive crashes, 100% recovery of the data is usually not possible.

In my experience, most of the data is not recoverable if any. Back up drives are quite different from the drive in your computer as they don’t depend on an operating system to run. It’s basically a standalone drive, that hooks up to your computer and plugs into a power outlet. So when they crash, it’s usually a hardware failure of some type, and that is never a good thing.

Above, you see I capitalized the word ALL. Should you have ALL of your important data, family photos, etc on a back up drive only? Absolutely not!

A back up drive is not a back up drive unless you have at least 2 copies of the data. For example: your computer contains the original data, your back up drive contains a copy of that data.

Many people carry around an external drive and use that drive as their primary storage device. It goes in the car, to the office, in the house, on the plane, etc. The when it fails, they lose everything. With all of the travel and bumps it endures, failure is bound to occur at some point.

Back up drives are super easy to configure with your computer right out of the box. As soon as you hook it up whether it’s via USB or Firewire, the computer detects it and the drive will prompt you to install the software. It will run back ups of the directories you select or your entire computer. If your computer fails, your back up drive contains a copy of everything. If the back up drive fails, it’s still on your computer.

Personally, my office contains a MAC Mini with two 1-Terabyte back up drives. I perform all my functions on the MAC mini, I store all important files on the first back up/storage drive, then I use Time Machine to back up the MAC Mini and first external drive to the second drive. Maybe a bit of overkill, but the use of two drives keeps all of my MAC Mini resources free and running like a top.

Online services also offer back ups of your data, I don’t trust them. If hackers can hack into your bank, what makes these online data storage outfits any better?

A back up is only a back up if there’s two copies. That’s the moral of the story.