How a Backup Will Save You a Day or More

The lightning fiasco is nearing its end. As regular readers know, my house got hit by lightning last Thursday. We have nearly everything back to normal. Our insurance company will, hopefully, reimburse us for about $6,000 for damage to the house, electrical system and various electronics.

I’ve written about how I was able to keep working without my Macbook by using my iPad and my data stored on DropBox, JungleDisk and Evernote.

The Macbook was dropped off at the Apple Store about two hours after the strike on Thursday. Apple replaced the system board and disk drive and had it back in my hands on Tuesday morning. Amazing.

Of course, my new hard drive was blank. I had to restore my programs and data from a backup.

I powered up the computer and booted it from a portable drive (one just like the Western Digital drive in the picture). I opened my backup software (SuperDuper!, a Mac only program) and performed a restore while I left and had lunch from my favorite place – Greek Fiesta. While at lunch I checked on the restore using LogMeIn on the iPad. When I got home, about 90 minutes later, the restore was about finished. Moments later I was back up and running just like I had been on Thursday afternoon when the lightning struck.

This story has a happy ending. Not every story about dead computers ends this well. We get reminders to backup our data, all the time, from just about everybody. Yet, sometimes, we don’t do it. I got lucky this time. I could have spent all day (if not longer) reinstalling software. Thankfully the backup worked perfectly.

Backup, backup, backup. Make your ending as happy as mine.

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  • http://www.GrahamLawCollaborative.com Kimberly Graham

    For we mere amateur computer users, why would one need both the portable HD and something like SuperDuper? Wouldn’t the portable HD be enough to do a restore?

    And how do they work together? For instance, after you lost your Mac, did you just have to plug in the WD HD and it did the rest? Or did you have to use SuperDuper with it? How?

    Inquiring minds want to know.

    Great post, as always. Can’t ever hear “back up” enough times.

    • http://www.rosen.com Lee Rosen

      SuperDuper! is the software I use to create the backups on the drive.

      SuperDuper is set to make periodic backups. When the hard drive fails I can either (1) reboot directly from the portable drive (pending replacement of the failed drive) or (2) replace the drive and have SuperDuper restore the backup to the new drive. Make sense?

      • http://www.GrahamLawCollaborative.com Kimberly Graham

        Ah, I thought the WD HD came with some sort of automatic backup capability and auto restore function. Not so? If that’s the case, I see why you’d need SuperDuper!

        • http://www.rosen.com Lee Rosen

          You’re right. Most of those drives come with some software. It’s not usually a full featured program that does everything. SuperDuper!, as an example, will create bootable disks and integrates well with time machine on the mac.

          Lee

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