Newsletter #388 Preview: A Religion for All Mac Users: Backups
May 7th, 2007I have to tell you that, when Steve Jobs released some pathetic figures about the number of Mac users who backup their files, I wasn’t terribly surprised at the unfortunate news. You see, I’ve been preaching the backup religion for years, yet most of the people I know still never do it.
Yes, I urge them, plead with them, but they tell me it’s just too hard, too confusing, and, besides, the chances that they’ll lose any files are just about zilch.
Now it’s clear to me that they are just dead wrong in so many ways.
The easiest way to lose a file is simply to delete it by mistake. Don’t think it can happen? Well, imagine you are in a rush to finish something, you have several versions of a file, and you dump the wrong one in the trash can. You empty the trash in a force of habit, and then, too late, you discover that you threw out the wrong file.
Yes, there may be ways to recover that file, but why should you have to perform an undelete option that may not be entirely dependable?
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.
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Backing up is a pain. The biggest problem is getting straight answers. If somebody could talk straight and honest, we’d do it.
For our family, we have 4 Macs, one Windows PC, and a Snap Server (family file server shared by TCP/IP). One of the Macs has a Parallels virtual machine running Windows XP.
What are we supposed to do?
1) Buy a giant external hard drive, and walk it from machine to machine to do the backups?
2) If so, do we leave it as one partition or make it into 4 partitions? How?
3) For the Macs, do we buy 4 copies of backup software? Or one copy?
4) Super Duper gets high ratings from many reviewers. But it will not back up the file server (the Snap Server)
5) What about the Windows PC? Can we use the same backup system? If not the same system, maybe the same external hard drive?
6) Since this appears to be so tricky, should we use a terminal command? We could type it carefully into Text Edit, put the command on each machine and then cut-n-paste into the terminal. Right?
Sigh – – – straight answers are SO hard to come by!