Something inside my beloved MacBook went terribly wrong the other day. I typed in my account password, and got that angry, shaky, “no way, you’re not getting in here” login window. But it was 7 AM, and mistakes happen. I wasn’t worried. I retyped it again. No go. And again--nothing. I switched gears, and tried logging in with a secondary account on my machine, one that I know doesn’t have a password. Again I was thwarted, and starting to get worried. I dug up my OSX install disc, and tried to reset the password. In the dropdown where all my accounts should have been listed, there was nothing. This is the part where panic sets in.

I’ll admit it. I’m pretty hard on my Macs. I’m always installing and uninstalling things, moving around big chunks of data, and generally mucking about with the innards of OSX. It’s part of the job here at Mac|Life. Stuff inevitably goes wrong. Because of that, I have a pretty robust (read: probably more complicated than it should be) backup system that involves Time Machine, as well as a secondary backup using ChronoSync. So I should be in OK shape. I should be.

The problem is that I moved into a new apartment a few months ago, and in all of the unpacking and setting up a new household, I still haven’t bothered to connect my external drives and get my backups going again. Like I said, my setup is a bit complicated, and re-wiring all of that has thus far seemed less important--and less fun--than building a dining room table, reorganizing my record collection, and figuring out where to hang my portrait of Pee-Wee Herman. So here I am in February 2011, and the latest backup I have of my machine is from October of 2010. This is really, really bad.

To add insult to injury, this all happened a few days after we awarded Dolly Drive our Best Mac Software and Best of Show awards at Macworld Expo 2011. Dolly Drive enables you to backup to the cloud, using Time Machine. So simple, even a magazine editor should be able to do it. Unfortunately for me, I had no usable backups--in the cloud, or otherwise.

So what’s the takeaway here? I hope you’ll learn from my stupidity. Back up…well and often. Setting up backup isn’t exciting. But trust me, there will come a day when a having current backup will absolutely save the day. Or at least save your painstakingly-maintained iTunes playlists, tax returns, and super-important to-do lists.