Is Your Apple Really Backed-up?

My friend has a Macbook Pro which is his primary tool, and he uses a few different backup systems. His laptop was stolen and the external drives, iDisk, email accounts and every other place data was stored instantly became important.

This story begs a few questions.
Have you actually attempted to restore your data?

Do you know where all the data for each of your applications is stored?

What would you do if your Apple was gone tomorrow?

Do you know all your passwords for important information?

My backup plan

I back my system up with iDisk, Backup, external drive, and I route all my mail through gmail to my Apple through mail, which provides web access to my mail from a browser or my phone. This also provides the anti-spam power of gmail. This is a useful article for using Apple Mail and Gmail together, and here you can see how to ready gmail for POP access.

Takeaway

1. If you haven’t verified your backup system by actually restoring the backup, don’t count on it.

2. Keep your mail in more than one place.