Good golly yes your hard drive will fail. As sure as the Earth revolves around the Sun, someday your wonderful internal drive is gonna go kaput. All hard drives will die because they are physical devices with intricate moving parts. (Not to mention that some of those parts move at 5400+ revolutions per minute.)
For Solid State Drives (SSDs, or what Apple calls “Flash storage”), their death is just as inevitable. They may not have moving parts, but they too will die. Like all things SSD, they will do it faster than traditional hard drives. In fact, our experience is that SSDs will work great until that sad moment when they don’t work at all, and with no advance warning.
So what can you do? Apple’s wonderful Time Machine backup was arguably the best feature of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It’s only gotten better since. Given how it automatically saves you from the cruel fate of internal hard drive corruption or crash, it’s close to a “must-use” feature of the operating system. Nine times out of 10 Time Machine rides to your rescue.
It’s that tenth time that I’d like to talk about. Sometimes your computer problem goes beyond a hard drive crash. Whether it’s fire, flood, or theft, there is an unlikely yet realistic possibility that your photos, music and documents could be lost forever. That makes me sad. I’ll bet it makes you sad too.
So what to do? Use Backblaze, a no fuss solution to getting all your data backed up securely online. For $9 a month, you get unlimited storage at their data center. That’s right, every photo, every song, every document can be encrypted and backed up over the Internet to their secure data center for only $9 a month (per Mac).
What happens if you lose a file? Simply go to the Backblaze System Preference. Log into your account via web browser. Retrieve the file. What happen if you lose a hard drive? You can either retrieve all your files over Internet for free, or if you need things more quickly you can get a restore DVD Fed Ex’d to you or a USB hard drive shipped.
I use Backblaze and think the peace of mind I get from knowing that my data is secure is well-worth $9 a month. You may think so too. Find out more about Backblaze and to download their free trial.
Free trial and download of the Backblaze installer
[MacAtoZ LLC receives a small commission for each user who signs up with Backblaze using any of the above Backblaze links.]