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Lessen the risk of hard drive failure
Edward Suhadi comment 0 Comments

Sorry Windows folks, this tip is leaning towards fellow Mac users.

As a self-proclaimed geek, I always feel that nothing can go wrong with my gadgetry. I always stay up to date with the latest tech, I know how to take care of them and I believe in the engines of Apple softwares. But a couple of days ago I hit the ultimate disaster: harddisk failure. Worry not, all of your files and pictures are well protected in our system, and after a Time Machine restore, my Macbook Pro is now up and running. Even with regular backups, restoring your main laptop is definetely going to be a pain, like I felt yesterday, spending my precious half-day holiday in the Mangga Dua looking for a hard-drive. So now I want to share a couple of important things I learned about this, so you won’t have to get into the problems I had:

1. Backup regularly. We are always told to do it, but as I read somewhere 90% of people never backup their data, and those who do, never do it regularly, myself included. If you are a Mac user, there’s a little program called Time Machine in your Applications folder, and it’s easy as easy plugging a hard drive. So, *get* one! One thing to make sure you are going to do backups is when you have the hard drive ready. And then, just before going to sleep, just plug it in, and run Time Machine. Tomorrow all your data is safe and sound. Even if you had a failure, you can restore back like nothing happened (the desktop picture, the icons locations on your destop, the settings, etc.) Really wonderful piece of work. Make it a habit, like, every Monday or weekends.

2. Mac users also love to close their laptop and go. I do it all the time. Everytime I need to go, I just close the lid, put it in my bag and then run. If later I popped it open, instantly I can continue to work. One of the reasons I love Macs is this sleep/hibernate feature. It is really-really fast. It’s 1 second fast. But then I take this feature for granted (like every easy thing men have on their live.s) Turns out you need to *wait* for the light indicator to slowly glow, then it is safe to pick up, since it takes the computer 10-15 seconds to copy the state it is in to the hard drive. This is where I go wrong, I usually just close the lid and then immidiately pick it up and put it in the bag. I think this is the main culprit of the whole hard disk hardware failure.

Hope this helps.
Edward