Actually, this goes for any Mac user: BACK UP YOUR MACHINE!!! Spend $100 on a decent FireWire drive, and save your life!
I was going to go into the horror story first, but I decided to just come out with the point of this article instead. About a month ago, my iMac started acting up, running real slow. So I closed all my running programs, and shut down and restarted my machine. To my horror, when the machine tried to boot up, I just got a folder icon with a flashing “?” onscreen. I didn’t panic. I opened my software file cabinet, got my install disks, and ran the disk utility, only to find that my disk was unrepairable. My only option was to reformat the drive and re-install the operating system.
What was the result? Though I had backups of completed GarageBand songs made, I lost ALL my GarageBand project files! That’s hours and hours of work that is simply gone. While I’m happy with the quality of the finished stuff (for demo purposes), I’m in no way happy with the fact that I don’t have the source files in order to make tweaks. After that experience, I saved a bit of money to buy a backup drive, and upgrade OSX to Leopard.
Among Leopards fine virtues is a no-brainer backup utility called “Time Machine.” Just plug in an external drive. Finder will pop-up a Time Machine dialog box asking you if you’d like to use the new drive as a backup. Select “Yes,” and that’s all you have to do! No thinking, no complex setup. Time Machine does it all for you. I won’t go into a lot of technical or usage details about it, though I did learn that you should let Time Machine run its initial imaging overnight. It takes several hours, and if you’re using your machine while it’s running, it’ll take longer. But once it’s done, Time Machine works automagically, continuously checking for changes to existing files and backing up new files – all in the background! With this ease-of-use, you’d be a fool to not go out right away and get a decent drive.
Myself, I got a Maxtor One-Touch III 320GB FireWire drive at my local electronics store for $99.00. It’s a decent drive with middle of the road performance. I didn’t need a 10K rpm drive. I just needed something that would back up my files – especially my GarageBand files! To test this, I created a new GB project and saved it immediately. After that, I opened up Time Machine and was pleasantly relieved to see that the file got backed up immediately! What a wonderful utility.
Even if you don’t have Leopard – get a backup drive anyway. Most drives, like my One-Touch, come with backup management software. They’re not as easy to use as Time Machine as they require a bit of configuration, but doing regular backups can save you hours or days of work!
Guitar Gear 
ok, now you’re making me nervous…
i have no back ups or nothin’. i thought mac’s were indestructible?! why did your mac do that? weird…
ig
I shared my experience with a colleague at work who’s also a hardcore Mac user and musician. He just shook his head and said, “I love the Mac, but there hasn’t been a single machine that I’ve had that didn’t have problems with the hard drive. I always have an external drive available that I can share between my Macs to do regular backups.”
I too thought that my Mac was indestructible, but you have to figure that doing digital recording really taxes a hard drive. That’s why big packages like ProTools recommend having two drives: One to run the program, the other to save recording data. When you run on one drive, you’re asking the program to utilize the same one for both processing and data storage. No drives are perfect.
However, all that said, in the past, for recording purposes, I’ve used SCSI daisy-chained drives set up for RAID. That’s probably the most efficient and safest way to do recording. The problem is that it’s expensive.
You didn’t have to reformat. Wish I would have known you I could have saved your data
I suggest that every one invests in a few pieces of software that will save your life.
1. Techtool Pro
2. Disk Warrior
3. Data rescue
I live by those tools right there
I also suggest that you Clone your main drive as a back up. Its a fairly easy process using macs disk utility
By using the restore function.
Perform frequent back ups to DVD of any Important projects. hope this info helps
I wish I knew you as well! I’ll have to get those utilities.
I’ve got Time Machine running all the time, so I’ve got a continuous backup going on. Time Machine rocks!
[…] Yikes! When that happened, I didn’t panic because based upon Boyd Jarvis’ input in my previous article on my Mac crashing, I went down to my local Apple store, and purchased a copy of Disk Warrior. I also talked to a few […]