On Friday night my Outlook email database got corrupted. It contains all my email as far back as 2004, possibly earlier than that. When was the last time I had run a backup? Let’s just say way too long, and I certainly know better. What could have been a catastrophe of my own making turned into a slap upside my head, as I finally got my email back and functioning by Saturday afternoon.
How about you guys? When was the last time you backed up your computer? Your tablet? You’re phone? All your photos?
I took some photos on Sunday morning so I could send them to Anne Laurie for the Garden Chat. I connected my phone to my laptop and promptly got the message that I couldn’t connect my phone without doing a software update, which I had been putting off for a more convenient time, which is invariably ‘not today, remind me tomorrow’.
So I ran the update and backed up my iPhone for the first time in a long time.
There should be public service announcements to remind people about backups, just like they do every fall for changing the battery in your smoke detectors. (only half kidding!)
I have two tech questions for the BJ hive mind.
- My iPhone wanted me to update to iOS version 15.0.1, but I didn’t do it. I have hard rumblings about issues with iOS 15 that made me think ‘oh hell no’ when I heard them, but now I don’t recall what they were and I haven’t had time to look into it. Thoughts?
- Why suddenly did I start getting fucking ads on YouTube 1-2 months ago? Safari on a Mac. I run 2 ad blockers. Of course when I was running my software updates I noticed that there was an update to Adblock Plus for Safari, which I updated, so maybe that will take care of it.
There’s a reason for the old expression that the shoemaker’s kids go barefoot.
How about you guys? Is there something you need to figure out but haven’t had the time to research? Trying to figure out which laptop to buy? Which tablet? Trying to decide between Roku and Chromecast? Anyone have tech tips for other BJ peeps? I’m not suggesting that I will have the answers to your, but I bet that someone here on BJ will!
No one else seems to be working on a front-page post, so I’ll put this up, but if someone comes along with another post right away, I can bring this post back later.
Baud
My fax machine keeps jamming. Any suggestions?
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: link it to your pager. Should do the trick.
WhatsMyNym
I’ve installed iOS 15.0.1 on my phone, but it’s a new phone and lacking a sim card still.
Do backups monthly or you’ll be sorry at some point.
oatler
Seen on Facebook: “Are there any news today?” “No, not a new.”
Chris Sherbak
I’m not an Apple head – but the v15 update was pushed by my comp to my work cellie – there was a security fix in there I think so… YMMV.
gwangung
I have iOS 15.0.1, no problems (and it’s stopping the sharing of my data between Twitter, Facebook, etc.). That’s the major upgrade for me.
Just Chuck
Desktop backups should be continuous, not scheduled, and most desktop backup software works like that by default nowadays. On my mac I use Backblaze, which is very unobtrusive and supports encrypted backups. Unlimited storage for $7/month, I’m paying $9/month to keep a full year of backups (normally they rotate out in 30 days).
Tried iDrive once, which has a lot of features, but it wasn’t reliable, and that’s the kiss of death for any backup software.
Redshift
For my phone, I’m on Android, which has gotten quite good about backups in recent years. My phone (with all my photos) died without warning a couple of months ago, and I lost nothing even though I’d never manually started a backup.
Benw
I have a 50 GB subscription to iCloud and have daily backup of my phone turned on. Costs 99 cents a month. Totally worth it.
Roger Moore
I’m reasonably good about backups. My phone and tablets use Google’s sync to cloud system, so they’re backed up automatically. I’m a month or two behind on my personal computer. My systems at work are backed up seven ways to Sunday.
I do my best to keep my systems up to date, but I also have the problem of only noticing when it’s inconvenient. My phone and tablet get regular updates, and they’re smart enough that I can tell them to update when they’re not being used. My home PC runs Fedora Linux, which seems to have gotten more obtrusive with updates to the point it’s now more annoying than Windows. The updates come out all the time, and it now wants you to reboot for updates that it previously let you manage without rebooting. My solution is to update less frequently, though the updates are still fast enough that they aren’t a huge disruption. The biggest problem is I have to log in again and set all my windows where I want them to be. First world problems.
kindness
Google which owns YouTube slams adds all over the place there now. I’ve been in the middle of a song and it stops and runs an ad. Screw them. I don’t use YouTube as my back up music source nearly as much as I used to because of it.
MattF
I just (finally) cancelled my last zombie phone/cable account, so it’s now official that I use neither coax nor copper wires and save over $60/mo. It’s now all just FioS fiber. More (much more) bandwidth than I need.
As for backups, I’ve got the native MacOS backup (Time Machine) for my desktop plus a subscription to Backblaze for additional just-in-case. And also whatever native iPhone/iPad/iCloud backups are available. I’d like to have an additional local copy— my old software for making local bootable copies went obsolete several months ago. And, yeah, I’m just a wee-tiny-little-bit obsessive about backups.
IMO, you pretty much have to keep current with OS versions. There’s also a new version of Safari, apparently improved and disimproved in various annoying ways. You can read up on how to revert most of the improvements.
TheOtherHank
For my Macs I have a hard drive connected that is used by Time Machine. I don’t back up my phone often enough.
BSR
My career is in technology, and after losing some family photos and getting roasted by my wife over it about 15 years ago, I vowed never to lose data again.
I now back up to a Synology NAS in my house that synchronizes to others at relatives’ homes in other parts of the country. My data will survive everything but a global nuclear holocaust.
I can highly recommend Synology as a good automatic backup solution. They are Mac friendly and can work directly with Time Machine. You may never have to make a post like this again.
RSA
I was adding a new playlist to my iPhone SE last night and noticed that iOS 15 was available, so I upgraded. It wasn’t a huge deal, but there were a few annoying glitches. The first update attempt apparently failed, with no status information. I had to do a factory reset, which was okay since I’d just backed up the phone a few minutes beforehand. Eventually the installation worked, though some things apparently weren’t automatically restored from backup, including Apple Pay, which is the single most convenient thing I use my phone for. I found a laundry list of suggestions about how to re-enter my credit card info, of which the third or fourth option worked. (I’ve written “apparently” above because it’s not entirely clear what happens in under the hood when Apple software breaks.)
All in all, it took probably half an hour of extra effort, over 12 hours of clock time, before everything was working again. Not a huge deal, but if I had to do it over again, I’d wait for 15.1 to come out. Security updates will be continue to be pushed out in iOS 14, so there’s no really strong incentive to upgrade.
dmsilev
iOS 15 has been fine on my phone. Haven’t really played around with any of the new features, so can’t really comment there.
Backups: For your computer, strongly advise two backups, one local and one off-site. On my Mac, I use Apple’s Time Machine functionality for the former (hourly backups to a USB drive) and Backblaze (cloud-based backup service, also runs more or less continuously). The cloud backup is for the true calamities, “house burns down”, that sort of thing, and is also a hedge against problems with the local backup.
ronno2018
Ouch — I am not a fan of Outlook at all (work makes me use it). .pst files are terrible. For personal email I have been on Gmail for over a decade. Not ideal as it is cloud only (although you can export all the email and it does work offline). You can import your Outlook .pst to Gmail if you have a $6 per month Gsuite account. Maybe there is a way with free Gmail?
Another option to get rid of the .pst is a $70 a year Office 365 account, import the .pst to Outlook cloud versions and it converts into an auto sync’ing .ost file.
SFAW
Backup? Not familiar with that term.
VFX Lurker
Anything I care about goes into the cloud with two-factor authentication. Evernote for scanned documents and business cards from my Scansnap; Dropbox for my photos and files. I use the Fastmail web service for my email, Google Calendar for scheduling and Google Contacts for my address book.
I prefer stock Android for my phone. However, iOS is required to use Procreate and other popular art apps, so I use an iPad for art.
I use Windows 10 on my desktop at this time to run 3D software programs. I also use Chocolatey to install/update freeware like LibreOffice and Zoom. I should have a backup of my boot drive in case of disaster, but I do not. ?♀️
Betty Cracker
Sweet Jeebus, do I hate Microsoft Teams, but I am compelled to use it for work reasons. For weeks, I thought it was interfering with the operation of other Office apps — in my case, specifically Word, which would occasionally freeze up while saving a doc and make me shut it down and restart it.
But the affected laptop was kind of long in the tooth and due for replacement, so I thought it was possible just the accumulation of add-on barnacles, etc., on that machine was the culprit. Well, new laptop, same problem.
It’s more of an annoyance than anything else; all of the documents that get shut down are saved automatically, so I haven’t lost anything. But when this dysfunction occurs and I open task manager, Teams is always open in the background even though I’m not using it.
I don’t know doodly-squat about how laptops, cloud apps, etc., work, as is probably obvious from this comment. But I do believe Microsoft is angling to become the Facebook of the Office set by scraping data from productivity apps for it’s Microsoft Viva “employee experience” platform. I am side-eying it as the origin of my problem but can’t prove anything.
TheQuietOne
@kindness: I’ve not found that with youtube yet. Some ads before a video runs but never stopping a video in the middle. I just started subscribing to channels and the controls are a bit confusing but I’m not tech savvy so…..
Lifeinthebonusround
@ronno2018: I’ve used a Microsoft 365 account for years and it’s saved me a number of times. If a hard disk crashes, or the local .ost file gets corrupted (used to happen more frequently with .pst files), I reinstall Outlook, sign into my account, and it rebuilds the local data file. Syncs across three computers and my iPhone. Similarly, all my other data files are cloud-based with local copies. My life is a lot simpler now!
John Harrold
I also use backblaze. It runs continuously in the background and does versioning on your files. Its saved me multiple times. They will even ship you a drive with your backup on it for big restores. If you send the drive back within a time period they will refund the cost of the drive.
MjOregon
I’d like to know why I no longer have the “See more tweets” option spacer line on Twitter. My feed now goes from recent tweets to whatever was the top tweet from my previous session. This morning it jumped from a hour ago to 12 hours ago with nothing in between. Up until about a week ago I could go back through hours of tweets from accounts I follow but now I can’t catch up with earlier ones at all. Any idea how to fix it?
George Tenet Fangirl
My understanding is that Adblock Plus was sold several years ago to a company whose business model was “charge advertisers for the privilege of being on a whitelist of ‘acceptable’ ads.” I believe uBlock Origin is the better recommendation these days for an actual adblocker.
Scout211
@TheOtherHank:
We have two macs and one macbook. All are on time machine connected to a back up hard drive. And both of our computers froze after an update last year and were restored back to normal with the time machine. (Although, we had professionals do it for us).
Our iPhones are on iCloud back up so that is done regularly but we also back them up on iTunes (but rarely).
The time machine is pretty awesome but doing the actual restore is above our pay grades (as oldsters). But it works great.
By the way, many back up drives now are teensy tiny and can be used for your laptops and are easily portable.
Starboard Tack
If you do your own backups rather than using a service, you have to close the circle and do periodic restores to verify your process.
Ascap_scab
Did a drive mirror on my laptop about 2 months ago. The spare is now safely stored in an EMP pouch in a fire safe in my basement.
Not that it matters anymore since I now do 90% of my work on an unsecured 3yo Samsung Android phone where the battery is bulging out the back and is about to explode in a fireball.
Ivan X
Hi Watergirl, if we’re talking Outlook for Mac, it’s something I know, up, down, sideways, more than most. Let me know how I can get in touch. (Or see our website at ivanexpert.com and get in touch that way.)
randy khan
Many years ago my wife’s hard drive died. I was saved from serious marital strife because I had done a backup a week before it happened. That, however, was enough of a wake-up call that I created a brand new system for both her computer and mine – there are two backups for each device, which I rotate, and in the Before Times I kept one of each backup at my office, so they were in different locations (and anything that would destroy both locations likely would be bad enough that backups would be *very* low on my list of concerns, if I was still capable of having such a list). In the Current Situation, both backups generally are in our house, which makes me a tiny bit uncomfortable.
Hard drives are cheap nowadays, so this is easy and very doable, particularly on a Mac where the backups happen automatically once you set them up and connect the drive. If you’re not the type to remember to swap them, you could do a local physical backup and a cloud backup. (I’m not personally a fan of cloud backups, but that’s a matter of personal preference.)
Percysowner
I backup my Macbook and my Iphone to Icloud daily. I also backup my Macbook to an external hard drive about once a month. Thanks for reminding me that I need to to that again.
Tarragon
A while back we had a break-in where they took all our computers. We had local backups on USB hard drives and we were super lucky they didn’t also take the drives. All our personal photos and files were this close >< to being lost forever.
They day we got the replacement machines up and restored we started automated offsite backups.
The current scheme is that no machine that we care about is ever more than 1 day from backup.
Macs: Local Time Machine backup USB drive and offsite backup to Backblaze (yearly $70 per machine)
Mobile: Apple iCloud backup (monthly $20 for all phones and iPads)
Mail: web services, plus locally on the machine so Backblaze and Time Machine
Photos: Apple iCloud photos, plus local which puts them on Time Machine and Backblaze
The one PC we have is a gaming machine so we do less for that. Anything we care about on this is in Steam or on disc and save files get occasionally backed up (manually) to one of the Macs
I can’t recommend Backblaze enough. Get this or one of their competitors. It’s available for PC or Mac, the price is good, and they’ll backup external drives, something that others (when I was looking) didn’t.
NotMax
I don’t perform backups as often as I ought, but then again there’s nothing on the PC so crucial or irreplaceable that it would be hairshirt-wearing time if lost. When I do get around to doing a backup, have a 1TB external hard drive onto which I dump the data. Only takes up a fraction of that space.
The one bit of maintenance I do on an intermittent but more regular basis is setting restore points on Windows.
way2blue
I’m trying to get my act together… Recently bought a 2TB SanDisk SSD and learned how to partition between TimeMachine and a regular backup drive. So all backed up since Sunday. Plan to do backups once a week. TimeMachine will nag me after 7 days… Although I still need to figure out how to grab (unbundle) my photos from inside Apple Photo and grab my songs from inside Apple Music.
I also pay for Apple’s iCloud but still don’t know how to tune what I want backed up and what I want to stay local. i.e., iCloud swiped my MBAir contact list & I want it back… Plus I’m fighting it over where to keep the photos taken on my iPhone.
NotMax
As for YouTube, have never ever encountered an ad there.
JustRuss
Not sure why anyone would back up a phone, all my stuff–photos, mail, data for various apps–is in the cloud.
On a computer, Chrome and Firefox will let you sync all your browser data to an online account, so a crash won’t lose all your bookmarks and saved passwords. I assume Safari and Edge do too.
Outlook, bleah. Use it for work, but would not for my personal email. Certainly wouldn’t keep all my mail local.
mrmoshpotato
Click it!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I tend to go about a month or so between Time Machine backups of my Mac laptop. But I do get them done, even though they take hours for some reason. Did one just last night.
The phone, less so. I’d worry most about photos, but those are on the cloud.
FlyingToaster
I backup the iPhone and newer iPad every time there’s an iOS/iPadOS release. Say every other week.
I backup the photos every month or so from my box to the server box over in the corner (ancient MacBook hooked up to a big HD with partitions for Music/Books/Photos/Videos),
I haven’t backed up this box, since it’s new, and it’s HD is bigger than any of my externals. The only volatile non-backed up stuff right now is minor dox. Mail is all IMAP; every six months or so I download all the mail and write it to a labeled DVD and file it. Messages, contacts, Notes, Tweetbot marker are iCloud.
For Work projects, I back up weekly, but there ain’t much of that right now. So I am mostly dealing with the WarriorTeen High School Hunt, which is all a Google Spreadsheet shared by all at ChezToaster. And many, many Zoom virtual open houses ?
azlib
I run a mostly Linux home network with a few Apple OSX systems. I run nightly backups automatically on all the systems to a backup server (also a Linux box) kept in a separate building. The backup device has an 11TB RAID array where all the backups go. I use rsync to backup the hosts, plus I use software called glastree which creates a daily snapshot of each days backup which lets me easily go back to any day and retrieve any file. I keep at least a years worth of backups online with this system. Needless to say it has saved me several times especially when one of our Macs lost its disk drive and I had to restore nearly 500G of photos.
My Windows VM also gets backed up with this system. Of course the files are big data volume segments. It is not quite as robust, but the VM is at least recoverable. I use it mostly to run Quickbooks and TurboTax and those files get copied separately to my notebook which is also backed up nightly.
RandomMonster
Working for a drive manufacturer in the business unit making consumer direct-attached storage, I would like to encourage everyone to back up your data to multiple devices.
Seanly
I lost almost all of my files in maybe ’07 or ’08. The ones I really cared about were my digital photos. Now I have a Seagate 5 TB external drive & do continuous updating. My big problem with this method on both the Seagate and some older Western Digital external drives is that they get congested with old versions and multiple copies. I haven’t found a way to get rid of some of the extra backups/
I split my 5 TB to also do a Windows 10 full mirror and now after a few months, my 100 GB of music, photos & files is over a TB of backups.
I should do cloud storage for my critical files (photos and maybe 10% of the Word & PDF files I have) and just use the external drive purely for a mirror.
Ramalama
I had some hard times restoring from Time Machine for a few Macs in the distant past for work. So I opted not to use it for personal computing. I use Carbon Copy Cloner and a few external hard drives that I rotate. I also use TechTool Pro to run checks on my computer but also on the drives to make sure no surprises. I back up manually about 1x per month.
Files I really need are on Evernote.
Passwords are all handled with 1Password.
Music is on iTunes until I can figure out wtf else to use. I hate subscriptions. Backups for music are everywhere for me.
I don’t want to use Microsoft for anything email related but am not digging Apple Mail any longer (I run my own small shop so my emails are handled by me and my email hosts). Anyone like anything else for mail apps? Or music?
Jess
To avoid ads on YouTube and other sites, use Brave browser. I love it. It’s basically Chrome with ad and tracking blockers.
As for backup, I bought extra space on iCloud and just let everything sync with that. Is that alone not recommended? Should I also invest in Backblaze or something?
Robert Sneddon
I upgraded the data HDD on my PC a couple of weeks ago, from 5TB to 8TB. I’m assuming bathtub-curve failures on new hardware with child mortality a real possibility so I’m backing up the data on it (ca. 4.5TB) to one of three generational (grandfather, father, son) external drives every couple of days. Normally one of those drives goes away and lives offsite but with the current situation I’m resorting to Other Measures. I also have incremental backups of work-in-progress on several different USB sticks.
Backing up like this takes work and effort, I don’t have a magic button that does everything for me with a single press but I’ve learned not to trust magic-button solutions over the centuries.
I have “free” online storage with a couple of services like Mega and OneDrive. They hold photos and other truly irreplaceable data (or at least stuff I really really care about) in the cloudy-woudy thingy-wingy but I’m aware they are under the control of other folks and may go away or otherwise become unusable without warning. They usually have an upper data storage limit for their free level but it’s easy to spin up multiple accounts using one-shot email addresses, indeed I think there’s methods to automate this to present the user with multiple free Mega accounts (each limited to 50GB, I think) as a single accessible pool of cloud storage.
Just Chuck
@TheQuietOne: If it’s a long enough video, youtube will interrupt it with an ad. I have YT premium, so I don’t get ads. Makes YT Music a pretty good spotify alternative.
Chetan Murthy
@George Tenet Fangirl: Can confirm. That’s what all my tech buddies who are in the know say, too. uBlock Origin.
Just Chuck
@Jess: If all your important stuff fits on iCloud, you can probably just use that. iCloud only ever backs up certain file types and locations tho, and as a developer I need almost my whole filesystem backed up, so I use a proper backup app. I treat iCloud as mostly a phone thing.
Just Chuck
@Ramalama: Thunderbird is quite nice as email apps go.
Jess
@Just Chuck: Thanks!
Eric K
iOS 15 has been fine for me, when I first updated my battery starting draining way faster than before, I went in and turned all the various apps background activity off and it’s been back to normal.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Every Monday morning my home desktop PC gets backed up to an external drive, and every couple of weeks I do a backup to a different portable external drive which is unplugged except when involved in backup operations.
I updated my phone and tablet to iOS 15 and haven’t had problems. Ads on YouTube, including mid-video ads, have been something I’ve been seeing for several years now, even with AdBlock running – maybe it’s time for me to get a new ad blocker (Chrome on Windows 10).
Debating whether to update my desktop PC (which is also my game machine) to Windows 11. There appear to be some nice features, but also there may be things I’d lose by upgrading. (My PC does show as ready for Windows 11.) Anyone else have any thoughts on that front?
Czar Chasm
Former Apple Genius here.
A good rule of thumb for any Apple OS: Always wait for the XX.1 (XX is the OS version number) before upgrading, which typically addresses 95% of weirdness generated by the version upgrade.
There are two sets of data holders in life: Those that never or rarely back up, and those that have had a storage device crash on them. I now back up regularly.
I’n not on YouTube often enough to justify going ad-free. Not only that, but most of the content I view there tends to be more than 6 months old, esoteric enough to avoid ads playing, or both. I got no dog in that chase.
RAM
I’m an admitted backup freak.
At the local museum where I volunteer, I’ve got my Mac Mini set to turn itself on and do a complete, bootable backup on an external hard drive every Saturday and Sunday morning using SuperDuper and then shut itself down. I’ve also got a separate partition on that drive where the Mini does a hourly Time Machine backup. I have all the other Minis at the museum doing hourly Time Machine backups to portable HDs. I physically back up our two Macbooks to portable HDs every month. I also run a FileSync backup of critical files–our museum database and our digital photo library along with other irreplaceable files–weekly to a portable HD I carry in my briefcase to create an off-site just-in-case backup.
I’ve got my home Mini set up the same way as my museum machine, except it turns itself on every morning at 6 a.m. and does a complete, bootable backup at 6:30 a.m. as well as backing up hourly with Time Machine during the day to an OWC miniStack external drive with partitions for both Time Machine and the bootable backup.
I use Time Machine to back up my Macbook Pro every month to a portable HD. Same with my wife’s Macbook.I have my iPhone set to back up to iCloud every night when it’s plugged in, and about once a month I back it up to my Macbook Pro as well.
As I said, I’m a bit of a backup freak after a couple disastrous crashes back in the 1990s.
RAM
I’m an old, so I listen to Atlantic Sound Factory on the web during the day. Like the music selection the guy runs out of his house in Cedar Rapids, IA.
dnfree
Decades ago I took an HP Unix class and the instructor told a story of the time he was called in to help with an emergency restore at a business. He got there right away and was introduced to the IT manager, who was in the process of packing his briefcase and heading out the door, the instructor asked, “Where are you going?” The erstwhile manager replied, “I haven’t done a backup in two months, and I quit!”
catclub
@Just Chuck:
is that the same as ‘This video is sponsored by….” interruptions that the video maker participates in? I get those, but I have never seen any other kind of ad on youtube. Are my hobbies too obscure to get youtube ads?
Ramalama
@RAM: Wow. Impressive.
CAM-WA
When I was a teen, my dentist’s office had a sign that said, You don’t need to floss ALL your teeth—just the ones you want to keep!
So, translated into the modern age: You don’t need need to backup ALL of your data—just the data you want to keep!
Relying on a manual backup system simply doesn’t work. Even backup fanatics have a hard time keeping to a reasonable frequency of backing up.
The only backup system that will save your fanny is one that you can set up and it will run by itself on whatever schedule you set.
Backing up only to a device that is in your house leaves you vulnerable to breaking+theft or natural disaster. So, everyone should have a local backup AND a remote backup.
Why have a local backup if you have a remote backup? Because remote backups are time consuming and cumbersome to restore from…they are best thought of as an “if all else fails…” backup, not as a primary backup.
Obvious Russian Troll
I have a multi-tiered backup strategy. The bulk of the data I want to backup are photos (I am an amateur photographer), and I have a metric shit-ton of them.
At home, I’ve got a Synology NAS and some external drives. On the cloud side, I use OneDrive and I have some stuff in both Amazon S3 and Amazon Photos as well.
The downside to OneDrive is that a) it sucks and b) I’m still vulnerable to ransomware; however, the price for a family package was worthwhile, and I can also use it for various other things. I don’t use their stupid sync model, though; I copy files into OneDrive, let them upload, then delete the local OneDrive copies (while keeping my master copy, which is stored elsewhere).
I have had problems with Amazon Photos and am phasing it out; it’s unlimited but it’s been a pain in the ass to upload to (although I haven’t tried for a while). S3 is reliable and I’m not paying a lot so I’m just letting it ride until I’m more comfortable.
Unfortunately a lot of this is manual; I’m going to script more of this for my photo workflow.
Kattails
Yikes. I’m on a Mac mini, and she’s a bit older, I have Time Machine backing up to a Seagate automatically. That would scare the crap out of me. I’ve thought about taking it in to the guys and having them back up to a second one that I can keep out of the house; I heard of a musician who did that with his stuff. kept the second in his car.
I suppose I could also back up all the commercial design stuff to the cloud now. Gotta figure all this out better.
Now I see comment #59, pretty much the same thing.
David C
@TheOtherHank: Also external HD with Time Machine. Only issue I’ve heard of with iOS15 is Safari looks different. Will probably upgrade soon. Photos on iCloud as well as essential genealogy files.
Jinchi
Last time I updated my several-year-old iPhone, the update bricked it.
Unrecoverably.
(It works now as everything other than an actual telephone).
I learned this was a common problem for my generation of phone and the only solution was … buy a new phone. My son’s un-updated phone of the same generation still works fine.
Middlelee
I back up my iMac a couple of times a week (My Passport for Mac) and update my iPhone when I’m notified there is an update. I don’t leave my phone plugged in overnight to charge anymore but if there is an update I plug it in and let update happen while I sleep. Everything requires me to do some small thing such as plug in the external drive and I prefer not to have shit happening automatically where I can not notice that it quit happening automatically and then my hard drive dies and guess what? Photos lost along with some correspondence.
I do plan to get a second external drive so I can carry one with me at all times. I live in fire country and can’t depend on being home to scoop up a few important things (such as my external drive) if there is a fire. I carry a bag with a weeks supply of clothes and thyroid drugs in my car at all times and I’d feel more secure if I had that second external drive.
mvr
Damn, that’s a lot of email to lose! IT sounds though like you got it back eventually. That’s at least good news.
I’m still running Eudora (Which hasn’t been supported since 2007) since it has all my saved email going back to 1995 or thereabouts. Each operating system change makes it more work to keep going. One last year lost me the table of contents for a bunch of my out email but at least I have another copy of that saved elsewhere so I mostly can retrieve that info if I go to the other backup.
Now Eudora sometimes think it has sent a message but it seems to have been dropped by my earthlink smtp server and I can’t figure out what the problem is. This is inspiring me to set up a new email account on my own domain but that has turned into a big project since it requires changing web hosting companies among other things. It will get done soon.
I am running automated backups but also do it manually pretty often since I really don’t want to lose documents and emails. I’ve already lost too much of my biological memory and having the documentation helps me compensate. Still, glitches can happen and I’ll no doubt lose something when they do.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Betty Cracker: Some programs stay in the background for good and normal reasons. Of course, some also stay in the background for reasons that are only “good and normal” for the software/service vendor, even if crap for the end-user.
If a program freezes while saving (or otherwise accessing the network) – so, you can alt-tab to a new window, or click the start button an see the menu pop up – that’s often caused by a network issue. So, if you’re trying to save a document in Word, it’s possible that Word (or, possibly the entire office suite) might freeze trying to upload it to the Cloud, if the network connection is down – but every other program should continue to work normally.
If the OS freezes up, so you can’t alt-tab, or get the menu, and can’t even control-alt-delete to get a response, that’s a Bad Thing. On good hardware, with non-buggy device drivers, OSes should get locked up only as often as Trump says something that isn’t idiotic (i.e., lockups should be extremely rare, and completely unexpected). At that point, bad hardware should be on the table as a possible cause, but it could be a bug in a device driver, or in the OS itself.
LongHairedWeirdo
@catclub: There’s a “thing” called ASMR. What’s ASMR? Well, if you’ve ever felt like certain sounds tickled your brain (or even your body), *that* is what folks have named ASMR. Whispers and certain vocal sounds can evoke it; some people like clicky or tapping or scratching noises, some people also like certain roleplay aspects – “librarian” is a common one (whispers, tapping on books, slow, crinkly/vwoolop page turning, focused questions/conversations), and others.
Long lead-up to: they will insert VERY LOUD VERY ANNOYING commercials RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of this intentionally calming, intentionally relaxing, background noise.
It has the same effect, when dozing off to sleep, as (I believe this is the right alert name) General Quarters has on certain folks.
(In deference to people who must jump into action, no, I’m not really saying it’s as adrenaline inducing – merely that it’s equally interrupting of that dozing-off feeling.)
frosty
Repeating from a couple of days ago: I ran an iPhone backup just before I restored it to factory settings to try and fix a problem. When I went to restore the data, I found out the backup was corrupt. Thanks a lot Apple for not giving me a warning!
So 1) as soon as you run a backup test it with a restoration
2) After about 8 hours of internet searching I found a $29.95 app that fixed the corrupt backup and let me restore my phone. Everything is back where it was. There were others that could recover your data but not restore the phone.
The miracle software was Backup Repair by Decipher Media. They’ve got lots of great testimonials from users, one of which is mine.
ETA: Backed up to my hard drive, not iCloud because Luddite.
Just Chuck
@catclub: The content creator can buy their own ads, or Google will put them in automatically in others, depending on how popular they are. YT Premium prevents either kind from showing up.
Pittsburgh Mike
I use Carbon Copy Cloner on my MacBook Pro; it costs $40, and can do an incremental backups in a few minutes to an external SSD drive. It manages a bunch of snapshots as well, and I trust it far more than Time Machine, which has screwed me a few times.
I backup my phone to my laptop.
You can even make the backup bootable if you work hard enough at it, so that you can literally work off of your last backup on any computer.
Ruckus
I’ve updated my iPhone to iOS 15.1 and it isn’t perfect, some of my apps decided that I needed to be punished for updating but with almost no effort all work fine. Now. Really all I had to do was give them a bit of attention and they all came around. I find that at this point Apple is seemingly trying to make us all like THE NEW WAY OF APPLEING. Or at least find our how much we don’t like it. I wonder if it is that they are bored and trying to shake things up.
Pittsburgh Mike
@Ramalama: I’ve been using Thunderbird for email on my mac, after Eurora got too old to support the email pop version I needed.
Love Carbon Copy Cloner. I’ve also had trouble managing Time Machine backups, and of course, it is slower than molasses in January.
Layer8Problem
My laptop runs Ubuntu Linux 20.04 and a few months ago I finally overcame my habitual sloth and started backing the damned thing up regularly, at least the stuff in /home/Layer8Problem anyway, to a Synology NAS using rsync. Every day or so I fire off rsync and voom. I actually felt a weight I never knew I had go away after I started doing that. The next items on the list are to automate it and set up something offsite. I’ve got a strong visceral reaction to cloud stuff I don’t control though. Oh yeah, and test your backups folks.
Esme
I updated Safari on my work MacBook yesterday, and I don’t understand why the “tabs” are now little boxes floating weirdly in between the URL/search bar and the bookmarks bar. I hate it. If anyone knows a way to at least get the bookmarks bar out from in between the tabs and the pages they’re tabbing, I’m all ears.
Jerzy Russian
@Pittsburgh Mike: I love the shit out of Carbon Copy Cloner. Worth every penny.
El-Man
My backups happen every day, to a large disk attached to my main PC that gets swapped out every month. It’s a little annoying to change the disk config every month, but it’s not a great pain.
On select days of the week – Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday – I turn a little NAS on at a select time and my entire PC is backed up by Veeam. It’s free, and can do versioning.
And the most precious data – Quicken files, my diary, business accounting files, and password file – are encrypted and backed up to the cloud on a regular basis – Google Drive, and Dropbox.
It’s not a matter of if your computer disks will fail – it’s a matter of when.
WaterGirl
@Esme:
Ding, ding, ding! Thank you!
That is the thing I had read about Safari in iOS 15 that made me think I did not want to upgrade. I could not remember what the reason was, and it’s a good one!
If you find a solution to that issue, please let us know here
I hope you are not stuck with that.
Esme
@WaterGirl: Looks like I am stuck with it–and in addition to tabs being boxes within the toolbar now, they’ve also done this screwy thing where they’ve changed “greyed out means inactive” to “greyed out means active,” and also the favicons on the tabs sometimes cover the x-to-close box? So my solution was to download Firefox and import my bookmarks.
WaterGirl
@Esme: Ugh. I’m so sorry to hear all of that. Dumb choices, Apple.