The Importance of Backup

I’m writing this on a brand new MacBook Pro. It’s nice to have a new toy, but it wasn’t my choice.

The old one blew up, stopped working, died! The high priest of Apple repairs read the old machine its last rites. Of course it was out of warranty. Of course I didn’t have Apple Care. And that left me at the Apple store with credit card in hand.

A backup meant my dead Apple wasn’t a complete disaster.

Macs have a dead easy backup system. It’s called Time Machine. Keep an external harddrive plugged in and an incremental backup is created every hour. That’s what saved my bacon.

As part of the 3 minute setup wizard a new Mac asks if you want to start by restoring from a backup. Say yes, plug in the hardware, click continue and in no time the old computer is back in a new skin. Simple.

And now I’m on the new MBP let me share a few nifty features it brings.

For a start there’s the multi-touch track pad. That allows the user to pinch and swipe just like on the iPhone. It’s handy when viewing pics.

Then there’s Facetime. OK, this is not such a big deal; video calls are available on Skype. But it’s nice to be able to dial computer-to-iPhone without needing to use another application. And that’s neat!

One of the big upgrades to the MacBook Pro is Thunderbolt technology that allows blazing fast connection to external devices. If ever I decide that waiting 5 minutes for a backup to complete is too long I’ll get a Thunderbolt compatible external harddrive. In the meantime it’s probably a waste of money.

The battery life on the MBP is a decent 7 hours. That one I like.