Dana Stibolt will be the guest speaker at next meeting of PPOGA – Professional Photographers of Greater Annapolis. He will be talking about backing up your important data redundantly and automatically.

The meeting will be held at the Annapolis DoubleTree Hotel (near the Annapolis Mall) Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 6:30pm. Free gifts from MacMedics for all who attend. $12 entry includes food, beverage, and door prize entry!

See the Professional Photographers of Greater Annapolis’ Facebook page here.

UPDATE 12/26/10: I’m re-posting this Blog POST from last January, because lots of folks are spending time during the X-Mas/New Year holidays to do some house keeping on data from 2010. I’m sure lots of people got new Macs for the holidays too, so be sure to read the Blog post below.

Two things to remember:

1. Never delete data that has not been certified in it’s new location or on a new computer.

2. Never use a computer to process and generate mission critical data without a back-up.

Always keep your data in two places at once while moving over to a new computer!

When folks buy a new computer (or get one as a gift during the holidays) and then transfer the data to the new Mac, they are often anxious to re-purpose, re-gift, or re-sell the old Macintosh. So much so, that once they see the new unit is up and running, they will ERASE the old unit and put a fresh OS on it in preparation for it’s new life. In many cases they have already made a deal to sell their old Mac (or give it away to a family member) and the sale is “pending” on them getting the new Mac up and running. So there’s often some pressure to get the job done quickly and complete the transaction.

NEVER EVER transfer or migrate your current data over to a new Mac (then delete your old data or sell an old computer) and assume that you’re safer then you were with the old drive. Data SHOULD always be in two places at once!

If you need to erase an old computer and you’ve just transferred ALL of your data to a new shiny computer, don’t let that “new computer” feeling of safety (because it’s new I’m at LESS risk!) distract you! If it’s a new Mac, run a quick Time Machine back up or clone your drive with SuperDuper BEFORE you erase that old data. In fact, one very safe way to back up and then test your data is to make a bootable clone of your data (you can do this with SuperDuper), you can then “boot” off this clone and test to ensure your data is all there. This way if something gets fouled up in the migration or transfer, you can at least have a bootable copy of your data and use that to work off of until you can sort things out. Don’t forget to ensure that new backup is also working correctly. This is a common issue, so DON’T fall into this trap!

You ALWAYS need to have your data in two places at once WHILE you are moving over to a new Macintosh laptop or desktop. Very often we see client suffer data loss during this time of transfer. In many cases the clients first scan of the data is positive and everything looks fine. Then they erase their old computer, only to learn that their e-mail or iPhoto database is corrupted, and they’ve lost some or all of their data during transfer.

You’re at a greater risk for data loss on a new computer right out of the box then one that has been in use for more than 90 days.

With all hard drives (and new hard drives in NEW computers) there’s a 30 to 60 day “burn-in” that if the drive is going to give up on you there’s a pretty good chance that it will fail in that time frame. There are almost no DOA hard drives, so the ones that have issues are the ones that develop one in that first 30-60 days. If a hard drive comes off the line at the factory and it’s got an issue, they catch those, and destroy them. In fact, it’s been quite some time, since a hard drive has arrived here at MacMedics “Dead On Arrival”. In a few cases we see them dead, when they have been improperly packaged for shipment. We cannot afford to have one of our client’s computers to have a sick hard drive installed in it, so if a batch of hard drives comes to us and they were shipped by an idiot, then back they go. Thankfully we buy by the case, so the factory shipping container is usually very sturdy, so this is not an issue very often.

See my website at http://www.HardDrivesDie.com. Yeah! It’s that common of an issue that I made a website all about it. It has my TOP 5 list of data protection-preservation tips. Also see my Friday the 13th Blog post on topic of hard drives.

MacMedics Frequently Asked Macintosh Service Questions: Time Capsule Data Recovery

Where do I go for data recovery service for a dead or failed Time Capsule?

Here at MacMedics we see a number of Time Capsules that have failed or have lost their ability to access the data stored on the internal hard drive. In most cases we can easily rescue the lost data and copy it onto another hard drive for you. You can also buy a hard drive from MacMedics that we can copy your recovered data on to.

Time Capsule data recoveries usually are performed for our Tier-1 Data Recovery fee of $150. This covers disassembly of your Time Capsule, the rescue of all of your data to a hard drive that provide, and we’ll put it all back together again so it can be sent back to Apple . No two data recovery cases are the same, so depending on your hard drive’s situation, pricing could be higher if we have to spend extra time with your data. Sometimes the the Time Capsule’s hard drive is so sick, we have to rescue and recover the data, then repair it to make it useable again.

If your Time Capsule’s hard drive has “failed” we can replace it for you with a new hard drive.

Don’t forget that data that is stored on a Time Capsule and not on your computer or elsewhere is NOT backed up. Having your data stored off your computer might reduce the risk to your data, but it does not mean that data is fully protected. Please ensure you data is always in two places. See our web site http://www.HardDrivesDie.com for more info.

Also, if your Time Capsule is still under Apple’s 1-year warranty or AppleCare, we can help recover the data and assist in getting your Time Capsule replaced under warranty.

Update 7/24/10 Apple has a Repair Extension Program in place for some failed Time Capsule units. See this MacMedics Blog post for more info.

Questions? Just give us a call at 1-866-MAC-MEDICS or send us an e-mail.