MacinTopics

Synopsis:

Making backups is great, but what if you have a fire? Learn how to easily protect your backups and other important data from loss in the face of fire and water damage.

Let's Begin:

If you’re a Mac user, then you’ve probably adopted the digital lifestyle. You take photos with your digital camera and organize them in iPhoto. You probably have an iPod, iPhone or iPad on which you listen to your digital music that you organized in iTunes.  You may take home movies and edit them in iMovie, and perhaps you compose music or create podcasts in GarageBand. In addition, you may keep important records like tax documents, spreadsheets for your investments and other important files and documents on your computer. Or perhaps you’re writing the Great American Novel or a hot new screenplay.  Regardless of which of these best describes you, it’s safe to say that losing any of this valuable data would be a disaster.

If you’re already using Time Machine to backup all your important documents, photos, music and so forth, then congratulations on making a great decision by taking steps to safeguard this information. But what if there’s a fire at your home or business where your Mac is located? Unfortunately, this generally means that all your important files will be lost due to fire and water damage to the disk drives that contain the data. However, there is a solution that provides safety for your data in the event of fire or water damage and it can be added to your existing backup plan for only a reasonably small incremental cost.

A company called IoSafe makes a line of fireproof and waterproof external USB drives for the purpose of protecting your important data in the event of fire or water damage. These reasonably priced external drives are listed as protecting against fire of up to 1550° F for 1/2 hour per ASTM E121 and protecting against water damage when submerged in up to 10 feet of water for 72 hours. MacLife magazine tested one of these drives in both fire and water and they were able to recover all the data they had stored on the drive without a problem. These drives are all plug and play USB drives which makes them a very simple and easy way to further protect your backups if an unfortunate disaster were to occur.

Because the volume of data in our digital lives keeps growing, a 2TB IoSafe Fireproof drive is recommended for use with Time Machine. If you have so much data that it won’t fit on a single drive, then it is recommended to buy two or more drives and create either a striped disk or a concatenated disk with Disk Utility that’s built into Mac OS X. This way you can have as much fireproof and waterproof backup space as you need while still being on a single volume.