Posted on 09/23/2009 10:59:20 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Hope springs eternal!
“Obviously, it is seriously unwise not to back up data regardless of your OS, but what other steps do you recommend a Mac owner take?”
This really holds true for any OS. In driving, you’re gonna get a flat tire. In computers, at some point a hard drive failure will occur and you will be up the proverbial creek. Mac drives are can be more difficult to recover due to how the data is stored.
Back up your entire system and applications as well as your data (documents) to another hard drive using Time Machine or some other app and periodically test to make sure you can restore.
Excellent advice!!
I don’t even run anti virus on the Windows side of my Mac. I just make sure that when I’m nline I don’t operate windows. All downloading is done in Safari the zip files are opened and looked at before anything is transfered to windows and as always I am offline when this is done.
In what way is it more difficult to recover?
“Mac drives are can be more difficult to recover due to how the data is stored.”
“In what way is it more difficult to recover? “
~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~
It has to do with how a Mac writes to the hard drive as to how Windows writes to the drive. There can be two parts that make up a file on a Mac: a data fork and a resource fork.
Recovery may be more difficult in that one fork may be damaged while the other is intact. You can have an empty data fork or an empty resource fork.
More on forks here
http://jonsview.com/2009/08/21/mac-os-x-resource-forks
If you use a Mac or Windows for that matter and have a hard drive crash and no backups (bad bad bad), you’d want to turn to a company that handles OS X or Windows and has a record in recovery.
There are some bad scenarios in data recovery regardless of your OS.
You send in your crashed precious disk of (unbacked up) data and all you get back are plain text files or just text fragments of files. And your original files that were nicely formatted Word, Excel, etc. documents are gone. Images that link to Word are gone.
Or you might get back a handful of files with one restore data and you don’t know what was not recovered. Or if you ar cursed, you’ll just get a mammoth folder of files with 198,731 file names that are sequentially numbered
file_9222009_1,
file_9222009_2,
file_9222009_3,...
file_9222009_198,731
Talk about a nightmare. I have seen cases where you’d be better off rekeying data.
Some better data recovery companies will not charge you if they cannot recover your data. That way, you save 2K or 3K before killing yourself to cover funeral expenses.
;)
The moral: backup backup and backup.
And DO NOT keep backing up to the same old ‘trusty’ hard drive.
Periodically store backups off site and as President Reagan would say: trust but verify.
Periodically do a test restore of your applications and documents on some new system.
Hope this helps.
Thankfully, Apple has a great backup facility these days, and with external storage being so cheap, there really is no excuse for (especially businesses) to get caught with their pants down. I use 'rsync' for my backup needs as it makes it fairly straightforward to keep my wife's laptop, and her home directory on my desktop in perfect sync. I don't even worry about backing up program data on our laptops or desktop, as my programs are basically a 'yum install... ' away.
One thing that is superior about the Unix way of dealing with user data is that it is (or at least can be) completely partitioned away from program data. My /home partition is on a separate physical drive from where I mount /, so when I update the OS, (even a full destructive upgrade from boot media) never touches my personal files, settings and personalizations.
You just can't do that given the way Microsoft utilizes the registry. IMO the 'registry' is an abomination, and the source of much of Microsoft's troubles.
I was called in to look a computer at a friend’s office. The PC was initially set up as a non-Internet connected system but at some point it was connected to the Internet. Since then it has acquired over 600 virii. It is running Windows Vista.
Windows is safest when still wrapped in bubble wrap. After the bubble wrap comes off and you plug it in it is only a matter of time before it is compromised through no fault of the user.
Thanks Swordmaker.
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