Backing up your data: a cautionary tale
As you may know, I work at the University of Nottingham Students’ Union magazine, Impact. We produce seven issues per academic year, which works out to about one a month. All of our files are stored on our main Mac Pro computer, which until recently was not backed up at.
This left us very vulnerable, so I ordered Leopard (the newest version of the Mac OS) and an external hard drive. They arrived last week and I installed both on Saturday, just as we were coming to the end of the latest issue’s production. I set up Time Machine just like I do at home and left it to do its business.
So I walk in on Monday to work on the magazine and turn on the Mac Pro. It went to the white screen with the large Apple logo, but stayed there… and stayed there. After 20 minutes, I was getting anxious, but then I remembered that I had just installed Leopard and Time Machine. So I reformatted the hard drive, restored the entire machine from the backup and little over an hour later we were back up and running as if nothing had happened.
This little incident points out a few things. Firstly, Macs are not infallible. Secondly, when they do let you down, it’s extremely easy to recover and get on with what you’re doing. Time Machine is an absolute godsend. Most importantly though, it’s absolutely imperative that you backup your data. Be paranoid about it. We could have lost a month’s worth of work and a year’s worth of archives. We dodged a bullet though and I dread to think about what could have happened if we weren’t prepared.
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