If You Backup… Checkup

Most of my Mac business clients in Los Angeles use Time Machine to back up their data.

Time Machine is reliable, but over the years I’ve found that you can’t put any backup system in place and forget about it.

Check regularly for the following types of problems:

• On any Mac, with no apparent cause, Time Machine can simply stop working.
• A brownout can stop a Mac, NAS or backup server from backing up. These happen constantly in L.A.
• One or more of the drives in a NAS fails.
• The backup sparsebundle for an individual machine is corrupted.
• Someone trips over a cable and disconnects the backup server. Quite common.
• Los Angeles is prone to earthquakes. . . but my guess is, you’ll be checking everything after one of these.

Backup servers generally only perform that one task, so they can easily go offline without anyone noticing.

Don’t expect employees to spot that Time Machine isn’t working. They have better things to do.

How regularly should you make these checks?

Ongoing, diligent Mac support will catch these problems.

With a solid backup system in place, I perform bi-weekly checkups.

All of my home clients in L.A. need to consider the following:

• Do I have a backup?
• Is Time Machine running on my Mac?
• When was the last time I plugged a backup drive into my MacBook Pro?

Many people have a drive, but the backup on it is six months old . . .  or the drive is lost somewhere in the house.

None of that matters until the Mac hard drive crashes.

Then you have no fallback position.

Information can be pulled off most drives that have crashed but the process can be very expensive.

In Los Angeles, there are few companies that specialize in deep data recovery. You may have to mail either the Mac or the hard drive to another part of the state..

Anything recovered is returned on a hard drive. It will be filled with folders containing documents, images, etc. You won’t be getting your Mac back looking exactly the way it did before the disaster occurred.

It’s really a lot less stress to backup . . . and then checkup 🙂

If you live in Los Angeles and have backup problems or would like to put a backup system in place, give me a call (310) 621-5679.

We also provide support and advice globally… so if you’re in Dubai, don’t be shy 🙂

Please leave any comments or suggestions below.

Have a good week.