Backing up your Mac to Prepare for the Inevitable

Drives Fail

All drives fail on a long enough timeline. We have seen drives that fail right out of the factory box on day one and we have seen drives that are still working from the early 90’s! But the truth that all drives will fail eventually is undeniable. And yes, that does include the new style SSD drives.

Backing Up

What can you do to protect all the precious data you have stored on hard drives? Backup. You should have at least 3 instances of all important data. One would be on your computer most likely, one would be on a backup drive that is physically connected to the computer so it can constantly backup, and a third backup should be offsite so if a disaster happens at your computer’s location, you still have the third backup.

There are a couple of considerations when creating a backup system.

1. How much data do you have that needs to be backed up?
2. How often do you add important data?
3. How much data to you expect to add on a monthly basis?

Answering these questions will help us narrow down what kind of backup system is right for now. Most home users have under 1TB of data, and they add under 10GB a month of pictures and files to their computer. For a user like this we would recommend the following:

• A USB backup drive connected directly to the computer (hat is twice as large as the drive inside the computer), setup with TimeMachine for hourly backups.
• Either a) an offsite backup with another external drive in a safety deposit box or similar, or b) a subscription to an online backup system (we recommend crashplan).

For a pro user that has 10TB of data and it grows by a TB a month, online backups are not going to be feasible. This use type would require a Tape based backup system, or using large external drives to store backups. Keep in mind you want three instances of all data, including data that is archived.

Backup Options

At EliteMacTechs we have a couple bundles that work well for 95% of general users. Our services include the external USB drive, the setup of the backup, and verifying that the first backup completes properly. If these bundles won’t work for your situation, don’t worry! We can come up with a custom solution to get your data backed up.

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1TB
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2TB
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4TB
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