Back it up!

It would be safe to say that you most likely treasure a good majority of what you keep on your Mac’s hard drive. What is a hard drive, you ask? The simplest answer I can give you is that a hard drive is where your pictures, movies, music, and documents are stored in your computer. The slightly more complex version is that a hard drive consists of a thick, CD like disc, a circuit board and an arm with a laser. From the moment you start up your computer it begins working; the disc spins, the arm passes back and forth from the outer edge to the inner edge and back, at precisely the same time the laser scans the disc while it reads and writes data to and from the disc.

You probably now have hundreds, maybe thousands of precious photographs, music and even movies stored on the hard drive. Maybe you even have invaluable documents and other personal and business information on it too. Increasingly more everyday we do things with our computers and save things as we go.

What’s the worst that can happen? Well, in an instant, without notification, it can all be lost to the mechanical failure of the hard drive. At best case you can have it recovered via software tricks, however at worst case you will not be able to get any of your cherished data back from the dead hard drive.

What can you do to prevent this from happening? First thing I will tell you is that it is not a question of if the hard drive fails, it is a matter of when it fails. The only thing you can really do to prevent losing all of your pictures, movies, music, and documents when a hard drive fails is to have your computer’s hard drive backed up. Meaning, make copies of the contents of your hard drive on to an external hard drive, perhaps on multiple DVDs, and/or having it backed up off-site (using an online backup storage website).

How do you go about doing this? The easiest thing to do is, if you have Apple’s latest operating system (OS X 10.5, Leopard), to get ahold of an external hard drive (preferably one with a Firewire connection if your computer can handle it), get one as big as you can afford. ( I recommend Western Digital (although their portables are not so great), or OWC for excellent quality and reasonable prices.) Then hook the hard drive up to your Mac,  almost instantly Apple’s built in back up software, Time Machine, will ask if you would like to use the hard drive to back it up, to which you will answer, yes. Then Time Machine will take over and make one initial full backup from your hard drive, from then on it will make hourly backups of any changes that you have made on your computer. Recovery from this method is usually very simple, however Time Machine is not 100% reliable. The backups have a tendency to become corrupt leaving you out of luck when you need to recover your data.

The software I tend to recommend for most home and small business users is called SuperDuper. This creates what is known as a “bootable” clone of your hard drive. Which basically means that you can run your computer from the clone that SuperDuper makes on your external hard drive. A very powerful option for times when disaster strikes and you need your computer immediately. Not only can it produce bootable clones of your hard drive, you can also schedule it to do so as often as you need. It also does a much better job at creating a backup that does not take up too much room than, say, Time Machine does on your external hard drive. All this and more for a mere $27.95!? It’s an absolute steal for the peace of mind you gain!

I could go on and on about backup strategies, but the most important thing I want to convey is that you get a backup strategy and use it. This will prevent you from the horrid pain of losing your most valuable data. I spend mornings as a Mac Technician in a Mac repair shop called PowerBook Guy, where the #1 thing we deal with is hard drive failure and replacement. I cannot tell you how many tears I have seen from clients who lost all of their data because they failed to backup their data. It’s always a painful loss. So prevent it and BACK IT UP!

One last thing I will state about hard drive failure and replacement is that, you should not panic and run out to buy a whole new computer if it happens. Hard drive replacement is a fairly inexpensive repair for a computer. I am talking under a couple hundred bucks in most cases, which is a lot cheaper than a new Mac. So, especially if you were wise enough to back up your computer, there is no reason to panic when your hard drive starts clicking and making grinding noises. When that happens, just give DandyMac a call, or send us an email and we will get your Mac back for you!

Maconomics

As it stands in our current economic climate here in the good `ol US of A, we are almost all strapped for cash. I would guess that there are a bunch of us out there that would really like to get a new Mac with a bigger hard drive that might even be faster, I mean really who wouldn’t? Trouble with that is that a new Mac is pretty expensive, which is not easy to swing these days. What is one to do?

Well, I will tell you exactly what you can do, and I do this all day every day for people just like you. The most affordable way of achieving the bigger hard drive and more speed is to upgrade what you already have. This can be done for a fraction of the cost of a new computer. In many cases it will run about $300-400. Most people I talk to are surprised that it can even be done, let alone how much cheaper it is than buying a new Mac.

So what can be done to an older Mac? The first thing you most likely want is the bigger hard drive. Having more room for all of your files, music, movies, photos, applications and everything you download is always a good thing. Depending on what type of Mac you have, you can go as high as 1 terabyte, which is a LARGE amount of storage space. To give you an idea of how much it would cost to upgrade the hard drive in your older (or even newer) Mac, it would cost about $50 for an 80-gigabyte drive and up to $100 for a 500-gigabyte drive for a Mac laptop, depending on the model. If you have a desktop Mac it can be an even cheaper upgrade and you can add much more space: up to 1 terabyte for as little as $119. Installation should run about $100 or less depending on what kind of Mac you own. So for less than around $200 you can have a much larger hard drive for storage. (prices gathered from http://www.otherworldcomputing.com )

The next thing you can do to give that old Mac some new life is upgrade your RAM. RAM stands for random access memory and it serves two basic functions. The first is it allows you to open more applications at the same time without bogging down your workflow. The second thing it does is add more speed to the Mac. The two in conjunction really makes a huge difference in your Mac’s performance. Again, this is a rather cheap investment that really pays off. For example if you have an iBook G4 (purchased in late 2004) you can max out your RAM to 1.25 gigabytes for $50 (OWC), if you have a 2.4ghz MacBook Pro (late 2007-early 2008) you can max our your RAM to 4 gigabytes for $60 (OWC). Installation on most Macs is very simple and you can find instructions at otherworldcomputing.com as well. I cannot recommend this upgrade strongly enough, you will love your old Mac all over again!

The final thing I can recommend to spruce up the old Mac is to upgrade the system software. The system software is how your computer runs, it’s also what gives your computer more functionality and features.  This upgrade can be a bit more of a challenge because not all Macs can be upgraded to the latest operating system from Apple (OSX 10.5 Leopard). To make things more challenging it is rather difficult to find the operating systems prior to the latest. If your Mac is under ten years old, odds are you can run up to OSX 10.4 Tiger. (Because this is an older operating system it is more costly than the latest operating system. I ran a Google search for it and found this to be the cheapest: (OS X 10.4), although I do not know about the reliability of the source.) If you have a Mac that has an 867 mhz processor or greater and at least 512mb of RAM ( you can find out what processor speed and how mach RAM you have by clicking the little Apple menu in the upper left corner of your desktop, then click ‘About This Mac’) you can upgrade to the latest from Apple OS X 10.5 Leopard for about $129. I do not recommend doing this yourself unless you really know what you are doing,  have done it before, and have backed up your data.

Before you go running out and buying these products it is essential that you know what kind of Mac you have and how far it can be upgraded. There are many variables involved in picking the right parts to upgrade to. That said, I recommend talking to someone like DandyMac (shameless self-plug!) who is a certified Apple Technician and Consultant before making purchases. Buying the wrong parts and trying to install them can be disappointing and even dangerous.

So for now save yourself some cash in these hard times and upgrade that older Mac. You will make you and it much happier by doing so. In these trying Maconomic times you can extend the life of your older Mac with very little expense and start saving for your next new mac at the same time. As a small hint to those of you who can actually afford to get a new Mac, I would strongly suggest that you hold off until the next round of hardware updates are released before you buy a laptop. The desktops are the way to go right now if you are considering buying new.

UPDATE: During my nromal morning scouring of my favorite mac news sites I stumbled upon this article from Macworld .com:    Opinon: Which is better for your business, a Mac or a PC? This guy has his own take on the economic times we are in and how his choice of computer helped his company. Perhaps a bit off the topic but it’s still great!