A MacBook Pro that has been run over by a car is every laptop owner’s nightmare.
Recently, a customer came into MacMedics with a 14-inch 2023 MacBook Pro that had been accidentally run over. The computer was badly crushed and the display was broken. Understandably, the customer was anxious—what mattered most was the data.
Fortunately, the Mac still powered on. That gives us a good chance to create a Time Machine backup and preserve their files before addressing anything else.
Here’s the part we see all the time: the customer had already bought a drive for Time Machine. They knew they needed a backup. They simply had not had the time to set it up.
That is not unusual. Most people do not think about backup until the moment they need one.
At MacMedics, we will set up Time Machine at no charge when you bring in a new backup drive—or purchase one from us. It is one of the easiest ways to protect photos, documents, email, and the everyday files that are hard or impossible to replace.
Our recommendation is to use more than one backup:
- Use Time Machine with an external drive for a local, easy-to-restore backup.
- If there is another Mac user in the household, consider rotating your separate backup drives monthly so each person has a copy stored in another location.
- Add a true cloud-backup service such as Backblaze for off-site protection.
One important distinction: iCloud Drive is primarily a syncing service, not a complete backup strategy. If a file is deleted from iCloud Drive or another syncing service, that deletion can sync everywhere. Time Machine can give you a way to go back to a prior version of your Mac and recover a file, photo, or email from the time before it disappeared.
Nothing about owning a Mac makes your data immune to accidents, theft, liquid, hardware failure, or a car in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The best time to set up a backup is before you need it.
This is a paid affiliate link for BackBlaze: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html#af9wuu
