I received an all-too-common phone call from a frightened-sounding University student yesterday. He had accidentally knocked his MacBook off his desk and onto the floor, “It wasn’t very high,” he insisted, “But pretty soon the hard drive started making funny noises. I turned it off and when I turned it back on all I got was the grey screen.” At that point I could almost hear the churning in his gut as he said, “How much to fix it and what are the chances of data recovery?”

Now I can’t fault the guy for dropping his computer. Never mind it’s a dumb-ass thing to do, but accidents happen to the best of us, and with a computer so versatile and robust it’s easy to take it for granted and drag it into situations it should never be in.

I told the client that it was probably the hard drive and potentially the logic board that was at fault and that, since it had been dropped, it had voided any warranty. A replacement hard drive was likely to run close to 0.00 with the installation and software restore, and a logic board could be upwards of 00.00 all told. Data recovery, if I couldn’t do it here in the shop, was likely to start at 0.00 or more at a dedicated data recovery operation. Money matters aside, this student likely had his whole year’s work on his hard drive, complete with essays and notes, pictures, contacts, software and more, an entire year’s investment in time and energy. But did he have a back up?

According to Apple’s own research, only 4% of users conduct a regular back-up of their important data. One feature common to Mac users, (and you can colour me guilty) is the sense of being bullet-proof. Which brings us to Time Machine, OS X Leopard’s seamless and painless back up feature.

The Time Machine application is an integral part of the Leopard OS and its interface is as easy to use as anything else Apple. At every start-up you’re prompted to configure your Time Machine back-ups and asked where you’d like the back-ups to be stored. You’re also allowed to choose any files or folders you’d like to have excluded by the backup. After that Time Machine does all the work, automatically storing the contents of your home folder on your (preferably external) hard drive. Each subsequent hour the Time Machine will back-up only those files that have changed, storing them in an easily searchable interface on your new drive.

Restoring your system from the Time Machine backup is as seamless and easy as building the Backup in the first place. Simply find the date or the file you’d like restored in the quick look interface, click restore, and it’s done.

Let’s face it, even Macs die and not only through drops, spills and burlaries. With 1 Tb external drives selling for under 0.00, there is no excuse for losing a year or more’s worth of effort and resorting to professional data recovery services charging a ‘desperation premium’. Prepare for the worst, back up your data

K’naan performing live at the Apple Store (San Francisco) on Monday night, June 15th, 2009. This is part 6/11 of this playlist: www.youtube.com Download the audio files (MP3s) over here tr.im (excludes Entrance/Intro).