Why back up your data?
We live today in a digital world: many aspects of our life are preserved on computers from your address book to all your family pictures or work projects. Computers get stolen, hard disks suddenly fail, or more likely you can simply make a mistake and erase much of your critical data from your computer.
You can do backups now and then to CDs, external drives or other computers in your house or workplace, but that doesn't provide you so much extra protection: you're still putting your eggs in the same basket.
The real solution is to backup your most critical data (personal & work documents, iPhoto Library...) to one or more servers on the Internet and leave the technical issues to storage professionals.
Online data storage is finally cheap enough so that it is now possible to store a copy of all your essential data on remote servers, and Persistence is the perfect solution for this.
Think about it:
- Losing your address book data: probably not a big deal, you likely have that data in other places like your phone,
- Losing a few days of work: quite annoying and possibly expensive, but not the end of the world,
- Losing your iTunes music: really annoying, but you can probably rebuild most of it (it's *just* money after all),
- Losing all your family pictures: you might be able to get some back from other people, but there's nothing you can do to get all of them back: without a proper backup, these memories are lost forever!
You can do backups now and then to CDs, external drives or other computers in your house or workplace, but that doesn't provide you so much extra protection: you're still putting your eggs in the same basket.
The real solution is to backup your most critical data (personal & work documents, iPhoto Library...) to one or more servers on the Internet and leave the technical issues to storage professionals.
Online data storage is finally cheap enough so that it is now possible to store a copy of all your essential data on remote servers, and Persistence is the perfect solution for this.
Extend Time Machine
If you are convinced of the need to back up your data, but already have Time Machine enabled, you might wonder why you should have another backup...
The answer is that Time Machine is a great solution as a first safety net: it backups absolutely everything and allows you to go back in time to retrieve older versions of files, but it can only go so far...
The answer is that Time Machine is a great solution as a first safety net: it backups absolutely everything and allows you to go back in time to retrieve older versions of files, but it can only go so far...
- If you backup to a regular external drive, it may fail mechanically after some time (some studies show up to 4% chance of annual failure rate) making your backup unusable.
- If you backup to a small portable drive, these are easy to drop and damage, again making your backup unusable.
- Or simply, if you're traveling and your Time Machine hard drive is not available, how will you protect your latest work documents or newly taken family pictures, in case you erase them by mistake, or if your laptop gets stolen?
Even if you already use Time Machine, having an online backup of your most essential data can provide the extra security and peace of mind so you don't end up loosing part or all of your digital life due to unfortunate events.