Oh dear.  My poor 3.5 year old iMac (the 28in variety) suffered a major, major failure this past week!

After suffering frequent and persistent 'spinning beachballs of death' last week, I worried that something was amiss and, between other work, started the process of diagnosing what was wrong with it.

It seemed that the hard drive passed all checks, and tests showed that the RAM and other hardware were fine.

But, my poor Mac was certainly still unwell, so I tried a couple of other resets - all to no avail.

After I had exhaused nearly all the tests and reset my login preferences, I decided to start up my Mac in something called Safe Mode - at which point, I got the dreaded black screen of death.

From that point on, any attempt to start the iMac up failed - it would look like it was starting but just give up and shut off after a few seconds.

At this point, I thought I had better admit defeat and booked a Genius Bar appointment at Chadstone's Apple Store - dreading the prospect of lugging my massive iMac through Chaddy for an inspection by a young Genius.

I decided that I would try one final thing before my appointment - pre-empting what I thought that the Genius would, most likely, suggest.  

Given that a successful Time Machine backup had been completed 5 days before it 'died' (thank goodness), I decided to do a full restore from that backup.   (Unfortunately, I would lose a couple of days' of work - the Time Machine had, without me realising, stopped working over a weekend when I did a lot of movie editing. Drat!)

I then waited the 40 hours it took to restore my iMac from the Time Machine backup, holding very little hope that my problem would be resolved.

Well, the good news is ....

It worked!!  And I am writing this article from my Lazarus iMac.  No more prolonged spinning beachballs, no black screen of death, and (thank goodness), no visit to the Geniuses!

I am just kicking myself I didn't take heed of the warning signs before it stopped functioning - I should have checked the backup was working.  This would have prompted me to separately back up the movies I was working on, to Dropbox or an external drive.

Hindsight is such a wonderful thing, isn't it.

The key message for everyone is - make sure you are backing up your Mac!  You never know when something could go wrong and, without a backup, you may lose EVERyTHING.

Kids and their computers!

A person in this household (who I shall not name, and is not shown in the photo) has just suffered a hard drive failure on a 3 year old Macbook Pro computer.  

A visit to the Apple Genius Bar is booked for tomorrow, but it looks very much like the hard drive needs to be re-formatted or replaced - both of which mean the loss of all data on the hard drive.

Now, you would be forgiven for thinking that, in this particular household, the impact such a 'disaster' would be lessened by the knowledge that all important data on the computer has been safely backed up on a regular basis - as frequently recommended by the mother of the household.

Well, no - not exactly.  In fact, not at all!

No backup, no storage of important files in Dropbox or any other 'cloud-based' storage. Unbelievable!

Are your kids the same?  Do they just not GET that technology can fail, and take no precautions to ensure that their valuable work, photos and other files are protected?  Do they just assume that their tech-life is bulletproof, just like the rest of their life?

It can be so easy to protect their important school and uni work.  Why won't they do it?

I am still shaking my head is disbelief and frustration.

If your child (unlike mine) is interested in finding out about how they can protect all their valuable data, please call iTandCoffee on 1300 885 420 or email enquiry@itandcoffee.com.au.