Your Mac is Not Immune To Data Loss

So you finally got a Mac. Excellent choice! You’ve lived the Windows nightmare. You have had one blue screen of death (BSoD) too many. Those spyware toolbars from Ask.com have popped up in your browser for the last time. Those brilliant Get a Mac ads finally worked on you.

Don’t let me interrupt your happy dance. But I just thought you would like to know that your Mac does not make you completely invulnerable to everything. No, you probably have seen the last of those incredibly annoying toolbars in your browser, provided that you use the built-in Safari browser. But even on a Mac, there are still ways to lose all of your important data. Here are some of those ways, and what you can do about it:

Hard Drive Failure

While most of the mobiles have gone SDD, most Macs ship with spinning hard drives onboard. You can usually pay extra to get a solid-state drive. But if you need a large drive, you will pay a large premium. Most people likely accept the default shipment spec.

That might explain why the first component you should expect to fail on a Mac is the hard drive, same as on a PC. When your hard drive goes down, it is no time for home remedies. If you have important data trapped on that drive, you are going to need a professional to help you out of that jam.

This is when you call in a professional data recovery service to see what if anything can be done. A good service will give you a free assessment, and go over your recovery options before you make a financial commitment that might or might not serve your needs. Data recovery from a failed drive is a hard computer science problem. That is the type of problem better left to the experts.

Beware of Ransomware

There are lots of wares designed to attack your hardware and software of which you should be wary. The list includes:

• Spyware
• Malware
• Adware
• Bloatware
• Ransomware

They can be delivered by viruses, rootlets, email attachments, JPEGs, ads, trojan downloads, and much more. Any of these things can send your data to the bowels of oblivion. Ransomware is even worse, as it is designed to send your data to a bad actor who will ransom it back to you for a fee. The data need not go to them at all. They can simply encrypt it so that you can’t access it. Their endgame is to sell you a key to unencrypt your data.

Ironically, the first known Mac-based ransomware was hidden in a popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing client: a type of software mostly used for pirating intellectual property such as software and movies. This attack only hit 6,000 Macs before being contained.

But it could have been avoided altogether by staying clear of such apps. The BitTorrent payload is frequently something malicious, as opposed to what one is trying to download. Staying clear of the Red Light district of the internet is a good strategy for avoiding viruses.

Failure to Backup Your Data

Regardless of what precipitated the data loss, the main, and only reason people lose data is that they didn’t back it up. You can ignore ransomware if you have a good backup of your data. You can also laugh off a hard drive failure. While such things will cost you some minor inconvenience, they can only amount to data loss if you can’t recover your data from a backup.

There are numerous ways to backup your data, including Time Machine and iCloud backups that are a part of your Mac’s operating system. Beyond those options, you can get online backup services for about 5$ per month per machine. It has never been easier or more affordable to backup all of your data on all of your machines, including your smartphones and tablets.

Regardless of whether it is from hard drive failure, malware, or putting everything in the trash and hitting DELETE while drunk, it doesn’t have to result in data loss. You can always call a pro, avoid the virtual Red Light districts, and revert to a recent backup. Emergency averted.