Backups, backups, backups
With the advent of the iPhone, many of the people we work with are beginning to turn to MobileMe, Apple’s online email and sync service. However there is one very important lesson which many have learnt over the last few years, with .Mac and the new MobileMe: backup regularly.
We have encountered a number of problems with contacts disappearing from the users Address Book, or iCal events being duplicated for no apparent reason. When a user combines a Mac, MobileMe and an iPhone, you have three chances of things going wrong. Everything from corrupted data to accidental user deletion, it has never been more important to secure your contacts and calendars. There can never be too many backups, and so here are a few tips we would give to securing your contact information.
The first step is Time Machine. Although we held off from switching to Time Machine until 10.5 had matured slightly, it is now a great piece of software and is one all Leopard users should consider. All you need is a good USB or firewire drive, and Time Machine works for you.
We however have chosen to tweak the settings slightly in the following ways. We choose to exclude all system files and applications. We do this as we have all of our third parties on disk, or can download the latest version if we ever need to re-install. We also have our Leopard disk to hand, and so using up external disk space for the OS seems to us a waste. But this is our choice and may not be everyone’s view
Secondly we choose to backup our Address Book and iCal data from within the application. Every two weeks or so we glance through our contacts and then do the following:
From the File menu, choose Export and Address Book Archive.
This creates a file with the day’s date in it, and ensures that you have checked and backed up your contacts. If your Mac does lose data you can then return to one of your Time Machine backups, or you can choose to return to this checked and verified manual backup.
The same option is available in iCal: from the File menu, choose Back up iCal. By opening one of these manual backup files, you will be asked if you wish to revert to this version. We like this manual method to compliment the Time Machine backups, as we know the manual versions are all correct.
We recommend combination of these two for all iPhone and MobileMe users. It is also important for anyone using iSync with a mobile phone or PDA. The exchange of data from devices to the Mac can and does go wrong, so a few extra steps can save a lot of pain later.
Simon Spence/2009
We have encountered a number of problems with contacts disappearing from the users Address Book, or iCal events being duplicated for no apparent reason. When a user combines a Mac, MobileMe and an iPhone, you have three chances of things going wrong. Everything from corrupted data to accidental user deletion, it has never been more important to secure your contacts and calendars. There can never be too many backups, and so here are a few tips we would give to securing your contact information.
The first step is Time Machine. Although we held off from switching to Time Machine until 10.5 had matured slightly, it is now a great piece of software and is one all Leopard users should consider. All you need is a good USB or firewire drive, and Time Machine works for you.
We however have chosen to tweak the settings slightly in the following ways. We choose to exclude all system files and applications. We do this as we have all of our third parties on disk, or can download the latest version if we ever need to re-install. We also have our Leopard disk to hand, and so using up external disk space for the OS seems to us a waste. But this is our choice and may not be everyone’s view
Secondly we choose to backup our Address Book and iCal data from within the application. Every two weeks or so we glance through our contacts and then do the following:
From the File menu, choose Export and Address Book Archive.
This creates a file with the day’s date in it, and ensures that you have checked and backed up your contacts. If your Mac does lose data you can then return to one of your Time Machine backups, or you can choose to return to this checked and verified manual backup.
The same option is available in iCal: from the File menu, choose Back up iCal. By opening one of these manual backup files, you will be asked if you wish to revert to this version. We like this manual method to compliment the Time Machine backups, as we know the manual versions are all correct.
We recommend combination of these two for all iPhone and MobileMe users. It is also important for anyone using iSync with a mobile phone or PDA. The exchange of data from devices to the Mac can and does go wrong, so a few extra steps can save a lot of pain later.
Simon Spence/2009
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