When you’re goin on a trip, the last thing you need to worry about is your computer. I’m always paranoid that I’m going to lose something, something may get damaged, or I’m going to need something when I get back that I’ve lost. I generally use a mix of an external hard-drive which sits on my desk, and a third-party cloud backup such as Backblaze.
If you rely on Time Machine to back up your Mac, it may not have backed itself up in months! When going on vacation recently I opened up Time Machine and realized that I hadn’t backed up to my external in over six month. If I had a problem with my machine, I’d have to resort to Backblaze.
Since I apparently need help in remembering to backup my computer, here’s some tips to help you remember:
- If you’re using Time Machine, set your automatic backups to ON. Not doing this is just asking for trouble.
- If you perform backups monthly, which you should, set a time on your calendar using iCal and get it to send you monthly reminders (and don’t ignore it).
- Have a monthly maintenance list and make sure that backing up is part of that list. I generally do monthly maintenance where I take the time to make sure my Mac is in decent condition, but for the past six months it wasn’t on the list. It is now.
- Part of the problem of backing up is actually remembering to do it. The beauty of paying for something like Backblaze is that it performs the backups without you needing to.
- Whenever you make a trip, out of state or out of the country, make sure to do a backup. If it wasn’t for me going out of town for a while, I may have never thought to backup, and that’s taking a huge risk.
What are your thoughts on this? How do you remember to backup?