Please be very careful if upgrading to APPLE BIG SUR

[mtenenhaus]

Just a word of caution.

I upgraded the operating system to Big Sur as it asked. I thought i was in good shape as i had very recently effected a full backup of my laptop (MacBook pro) using an external hard drive via Time Machine.

On my computer was 20 years of lectures and countless photos. I thought i was extra safe as i would monthly do a complete backup. At least i thought i was doing a complete backup as each backup took a very long time to complete... and as such appeared to me (a novice) as though it was a complete mirror image backup.

The long and short of it is my backup external hard drive for some reason wasn't backing up my photos...thankfully it did back up my lectures and all my documents etc.

The laptop after the "upgrade" lacked all my lectures, years of work and all my photos. I spent 2 hours with Apple Support and they couldn't find the photos... Thankfully we found the lectures and they remain on my external hard drive but the loss of many hundreds of photos is devastating.

I'm going to buy a PC on Black Friday and try to salvage what i have left from my external hard drive.

I'll use the apple mac only for internet nonsense.

[ocabj]

I've had zero problems with Mac OS in the 20 years I've been using it as my primary working OS.

I've got 15+ years of photos, RAW and processed images, and everything in between (working PSDs with multiple layers). Photos are on external drives per calendar year and those external drives are cloned on a monthly basis (rsync) so I basically have two copies of my annual media drives in two physical locations.

Are you faculty? Shouldn't your lecture and research data be going to your institution's storage solutions for proper archiving?

[Californio]

I have a Time Machine backup drives but I also have an external drives that has file by file archives of my important stuff as well in folders, cannot be too safe, using the old school grandfather, father, son - I have three sets and one is always offsite.

[hermosabeach]

The sell an external drive bay where you can easily remove the drives.
Have 2-3 drives
Back up to drive 1

Week 2 - back up to drive 2

Week 3- drive 3

Repeat

Or store one drive in your safe. The systems are cheap and drives are cheap.


I prefer to mirror things and not compress back ups

[mtenenhaus]

great advice

[randomBytes]

I've never kept anything important on a Mac, and never had a Windoze machine. My fileservers run BSD and do real backups (which occasionally get tested ;-), long since had to abandon tape for backups too ;-)

[ibanezfoo]