Mr. Backup had his MacBooks and iPads stolen this week. (That’s the end of me referring to myself in the third person.) I’ve told the story dozens of times this week, but here goes. I went to dinner in Houston last Tuesday night, and was tired and in a rush and didn’t really think about the fact that we left our two backpacks sitting in plain site in the back seat of our rental car when we went inside. I never do that. I always move things of value to the trunk, or at least cover them with something so they don’t scream “Hey, smash the window and steal me!”
When we came out of the restaurant, our rear passenger window had been broken and our two backpacks were gone. In those two backpacks were two MacBook Pros, a MacBook Air, two iPad Minis, and an iPad 2. (Yes, we use all of that equipment when we put on a seminar.) We called the police and filed a police report with two very nice policemen.
While waiting for the police to arrive, we pulled out our iPhones, logged into “Find iPhone” and tried to locate our stolen devices. They were offline, of course, but we were able to set them to be erased as soon as someone turns them on. Very nice feature.
Yes, I had backups. We use a file sync/share client for anything important. I use iCloud for my phones and iPads and I also have a regular cloud backup software product for anything that misses. Replacing the iPad was easy. I logged in using my icloud password and then just waited as all of my apps were automatically installed including data they contained. It was a piece of cake.
The sync and share client took a little bit longer because it’s a lot more data. I was able to select the directories I wanted to prioritize so that they were synced sooner. Then I just kept selecting more directories as each directory set was fully synced to my new MacBook.
Then I was able to do a restore of random files that backed up using the cloud backup product. All in all the experience wasn’t too bad.
I do think that the iCloud experience was probably the nicest of all of them. Being able to remotely wipe my systems gave me some piece of mind. And then restoring all my iPad data was easy as well.
If you don’t have a solid backup program for your remote devices, now would be a good time to look into it. You never know when you’re going to be the next statistic. While you’re at it, make sure your data center has backups being automatically sent offsite, too. Most data centers could be served very well by some type of public cloud offering for disaster recovery.
W. Curtis Preston (aka Mr. Backup) is an expert in backup & recovery systems; a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written three books on the subject, Backup & Recovery, Using SANs and NAS, and Unix Backup & Recovery. Mr. Preston is a writer and has spoken at hundreds of seminars and conferences around the world. Preston’s mission is to arm today’s IT managers with truly unbiased information about today’s storage industry and its products.
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