Yes, you’ve heard it a thousand and three times: Back up your Mac. Back Up, Back Up, Back Up! It’s the essence of safety and security. Hard drives fail, computers crash, power goes out, thefts and fires and blizzards and hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes occur. Okay, maybe not all that often, and thank Joe Pesci, not all at once. But any one of those things and many other unforeseen disasters can happen at any time, anywhere. To you, believe it or not. Positive attitude alone will not save your data, your emails, your pics, your writings, and all your other valuable files. But backing up will!
It’s not that difficult, it really isn’t. Here I’m going to present alternatives for creating a backup for saving your stuff before it’s too late to save.
The first and perhaps most obvious solution for Mac users is to use Time Machine. Time Machine is part of OS X and it is simple and easy to use, but you need a second or additional hard drive, separate from your internal main Macintosh HD. There are many external hard drives available on Amazon and other online retailers. I used to use external FireWire hard drives, bare SATA drives just like you find in a Mac desktop (iMac, Mac Pro) that I installed in FireWire enclosures myself. This always gave me the choice of using a 7200 RPM drive, but the enclosures I like, WiebeTech, are no longer available at a reasonable price and I have not found any others that are reliable and well-made; mostly they are Chinese junk, and I’m not referring to a type sailboat.
Internal hard drives have gotten much larger in recent years, in both desktops and laptops; my iMac 27″ has a 1TB drive and so I need at least a 1TB external drive for backup. Today you can buy a 1 or 2TB external USB 3.0 “portable” drive, i.e., an enclosure with a 2.5″ laptop hard drive in it. This, I think is ideal. They are small, light, quiet, run fairly cool and are portable! Being portable you can disconnect it and take it with you, and that’s important if you’re backing up a Mac that is left at an office or some other remote place. If you have a Mac at home, you may want to back it up and take the back up to the office with you, or at least keep it in some other part of the house. It’s simply a matter of not keeping the back up in the same place as the original in case disaster strikes where the original is kept.
If you’re only using a hard drive for back ups it’s not going to get the same usage that the original drive is; it is not doing all the work, just transferring files and then sitting idle. As I mention in my other recent post, Upgrading Your Mac’s Hard Drive, I had a Toshiba 2TB 3.5″ drive fail on me. It was within the warranty period and Toshiba not only accepted the return but gave me double the amount that the drive cost to purchase another drive, or two, directly from Toshiba. This was a fantastic deal. I ordered both a 1TB and 2TB portable drive (with 2.5″ laptop drives), both USB 3.0 that is backward compatible with my USB 2.0, at no cost. What’s great about these drives is they do not need an external power supply, so all I have to do is plug in the USB cable (both drives come with the appropriate USB cable) and the drive mounts immediately on my desktop. Perfect for doing Time Machine backups. USB 2.0 is not that fast, and the drives are 5400 RPM, but working in the background speed is not of the essence. I’m hoping these Toshiba portable drives will last a long time. I’ll let you know if they don’t.
Recommended Portable Hard Drives on Amazon. I highly recommend the HGST drives that are 7200 RPM.
If you don’t want to hassle with buying an external hard drive, assuming you don’t already have one, then a great alternative is to back up to the Cloud. For Macs iCloud Drive is one of the solutions, but it is only available on Macs running Yosemite (frankly, I do not like OS X Yosemite). iCloud Drive is a subscription service that you pay a monthly fee for. iCloud, that comes with previous OS X installations offers 5Gb of space free that is good for backing up your iPhone and iPad settings and apps, but is useless for backing up large hard drives. The cost for 1TB of space on iCloud Drive is $19.95 a month. I think that’s too much to pay, considering a 1TB external portable drive only costs about $60 and would pay for itself in just 3 months.
More about iCloud and iCloud Drive.
I used to not trust storing my stuff on the Cloud, somewhere far away from where I am, unseen and unknown to me, perhaps not secure, other people looking at my files, stealing my photos and other intellectual property. But with the ever-increasing speed and increased bandwidth offered by many ISPs and with the advanced security now present on the web, I have become an advocate for backing up to the Cloud. What I recommend is Backblaze.
Backblaze is a great way to get all your files backed up automatically. It’s easy. It’s secure. And if you lose data for any reason, you will be glad you have Backblaze backing up all of your files on the Cloud. Backblaze is only $5/month per computer. You can also get a discount by buying a year for $50 ($10 off) or two years for $95 ($25 off). It’s a wonderful way to protect all your data. And get this: Backblaze is the unlimited company – unlimited data, unlimited file size, unlimited bandwidth. Yes, it’s really unlimited. Follow the link below for more information and a free trial.
Use Backblaze for Backing Up Your Mac