Maintain your Mac for longer computer life
This is the time of year when we have the opportunity to examine our lives and express our gratitude. I just want to thank each of you, my clients, for your devotion, your business, and your friendship. Some of you I’ve worked with for 15 years, with others, I’ve just started the journey. Your questions inspire me to keep learning and improving my skills and your faith in me spurs me to do my best to keep your computer healthy and to help you progress in your skills.
I know that everyone is feeling the pinch of difficult economic times, and that financial concerns may have waylaid plans to purchase a new computer system or to upgrade your current system. That makes it more important than ever to keep up with regular maintenance and regular backups. Recently a client called me to tell me that her computer was running very slowly, and that sometimes when she double clicked on a folder nothing would happen. I asked how long it had been since I helped her with regular maintenance tasks, and there was a silence on the other end.
Then, “Maintenance?”
I asked, “How long between oil changes in your car?”
She answered with pride, “Oh, just 2-3000 miles.”
“And how long have you had your computer?”
Again, silence.
We scheduled an appointment for the next day. Now her computer runs normally, she says it seems almost like a new computer. I can’t guarantee new computer behavior for every old computer, but getting the digital sludge out will certainly help. Call me.
Another story: my dad called me last week in a panic - his computer’s hard drive had failed. Silly me, my first question to him was if he had a backup and of course, he would not have been in the panic if he had had a backup. He wanted to know if I could help him recover the data on the drive. He had already sent the drive to the local Geek Squad, and they wanted to send it to a specialist who wanted upwards of $1300 to perform the recovery. Unfortunately if they were asking for $1300 it was past the point where I could help him. The one thing I could do was to emphasize the importance of having a backup system. There’s an old saw in the computer industry that there are two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data, and those who will lose data. That’s it, just two kinds. A regular backup will make the loss much less painful. Please don’t be lulled into backup-less complacency by the fact that your computer is new. Although much less frequent, even new drives fail.
Now, there are backups, and then there are BACKUPS. Dragging files from your hard drive to a thumb drive is not a backup. There are several important elements to a backup that ensures the safety of your data:
Personally I highly recommend the Seagate Free Agent drives; their 500GB drives, sold by newegg.com, are very reasonable at about $110.
If you’re running an earlier version of Mac OS X there are a few choices. You could upgrade to 10.5 which has other benefits to recommend it, or you could get a third-party utility such as Bru or Retrospect. Call me and let’s find out what the best option for you will be.
And if you put off getting your backup system going and your hard drive craps out I still may be able to help with data recovery. I’m equipped to do the first level of data recovery myself and can offer you a 10% discount at Drive Savers if the first level doesn’t work.
And if your hard drive has never crapped out that’s another thing for which to give thanks this Thanksgiving.
I know that everyone is feeling the pinch of difficult economic times, and that financial concerns may have waylaid plans to purchase a new computer system or to upgrade your current system. That makes it more important than ever to keep up with regular maintenance and regular backups. Recently a client called me to tell me that her computer was running very slowly, and that sometimes when she double clicked on a folder nothing would happen. I asked how long it had been since I helped her with regular maintenance tasks, and there was a silence on the other end.
Then, “Maintenance?”
I asked, “How long between oil changes in your car?”
She answered with pride, “Oh, just 2-3000 miles.”
“And how long have you had your computer?”
Again, silence.
We scheduled an appointment for the next day. Now her computer runs normally, she says it seems almost like a new computer. I can’t guarantee new computer behavior for every old computer, but getting the digital sludge out will certainly help. Call me.
Another story: my dad called me last week in a panic - his computer’s hard drive had failed. Silly me, my first question to him was if he had a backup and of course, he would not have been in the panic if he had had a backup. He wanted to know if I could help him recover the data on the drive. He had already sent the drive to the local Geek Squad, and they wanted to send it to a specialist who wanted upwards of $1300 to perform the recovery. Unfortunately if they were asking for $1300 it was past the point where I could help him. The one thing I could do was to emphasize the importance of having a backup system. There’s an old saw in the computer industry that there are two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data, and those who will lose data. That’s it, just two kinds. A regular backup will make the loss much less painful. Please don’t be lulled into backup-less complacency by the fact that your computer is new. Although much less frequent, even new drives fail.
Now, there are backups, and then there are BACKUPS. Dragging files from your hard drive to a thumb drive is not a backup. There are several important elements to a backup that ensures the safety of your data:
- It should be automatic.
- It should be regular. You can determine how regular by thinking about how much you want to have to re-create – a day’s worth of work, a week’s, a month’s?
- It should be incremental. This means that the first backup backs up everything that you want backed up; subsequently only files that are new or have changed are backed up.
- It should be to an external drive.
Personally I highly recommend the Seagate Free Agent drives; their 500GB drives, sold by newegg.com, are very reasonable at about $110.
If you’re running an earlier version of Mac OS X there are a few choices. You could upgrade to 10.5 which has other benefits to recommend it, or you could get a third-party utility such as Bru or Retrospect. Call me and let’s find out what the best option for you will be.
And if you put off getting your backup system going and your hard drive craps out I still may be able to help with data recovery. I’m equipped to do the first level of data recovery myself and can offer you a 10% discount at Drive Savers if the first level doesn’t work.
And if your hard drive has never crapped out that’s another thing for which to give thanks this Thanksgiving.
Labels: macintosh maintenance
posted by Karelle at 1:55 PM
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