Chapter 5
Safety and Troubleshooting
In This Chapter
Backing up your files
What to do if your Mac won’t start
Although Macs are generally reliable beasts (especially Macs running Mac OS X), someday your hard drive will die. I promise. They all do. And if you don’t back up your hard drive (or at least back up any files that you can’t afford to lose) before that day comes, chances are good that you’ll never see your files again.
In other words, you absolutely, positively, without question must back up your files if you don’t want to risk losing them. Just as you adopt the Shut Down command and make it a habit before turning off your machine, you must remember to back up important files on your hard drive to another disk or device — and back them up often.
How often is often? That depends on you. How much work can you afford to lose? If your answer is that losing everything you did yesterday would put you out of business, then you need to back up daily or possibly twice a day. If you would lose only a few unimportant documents, you can back up less frequently.
Backing Up Is (Not) Hard to Do
You can back up your hard drive in basically two ways: the super-painless way with Snow Leopard’s excellent Time Machine or the ugly way using the brute-force method.
Backing up with Snow Leopard’s excellent Time Machine
Time Machine is a most excellent backup system that was introduced with ...
