So we all know not to drive distracted, tired, or even drunk. Same holds true when you’re doing a computer project and you’re moving data around. Hey Mac friends, it’s Dana here from MacMedics again with another tale of woe.
So I spoke to a customer a few weeks ago about a hard drive that he accidentally erased. This happened to be his media drive. A media drive is where — when your computer starts running out of space, you start moving your photos and videos over to the media drive. It’s something that the Apple Store will tell you to do. It’s a very common practice. The problem is that when you take the data off the computer and you put it on an external hard drive, it’s actually at greater risk. Plus, we can’t just have data in one place — it always has to be in at least two places.
So he was trying to set up a Time Machine to protect his data, but it was at night, he was tired, he was not paying attention, and he ended up formatting his media drive and then set it up as his Time Machine and let it run for a few days. The data that was on that drive — it’s never coming back.
So there’s two rules here. Rule number one: don’t compute distracted, don’t rush. When you’re formatting hard drives, you want to remove all external volumes so you don’t accidentally erase the wrong drive. Now the Mac will prevent you from erasing the boot-up drive if you’re booted from it, but it won’t prevent you from erasing anything else. And if you’re like me and you have four or five drives attached at one time, it could be very easy to accidentally erase one that you did not intend to.
The other issue here is if you have a media drive — and that’s perfectly okay — it has to be backed up. So what you do is you set up a Time Machine overwatch, or umbrella, where your Time Machine drive is 1.5 times the size of your internal data — that’s the size of the data that’s on your computer and your media drive. And by default, Apple excludes all external hard drives from backup, so to include them you just have to remove them from the exclusion list. So in my case, if I had Dana’s Mac and Dana’s media drive on Time Machine, I would have two separate folders — one for Dana’s Mac and one for Dana’s media drive — and both of them would be Time Machine backups. Mac separates it for you. Time Machine is one of the most powerful features in all of macOS, so it is super easy to use, but you just have to be careful when you’re formatting hard drives. And that’s why I advise my customers to always eject all external hard drives.
Don’t compute distracted. If you’re on a tight deadline or trying to hustle to get something done, you need to pause and take your time. Two years ago, one of my customers who is a wedding photographer accidentally erased an SD card with a couple’s wedding, and the wedding was lost — all the photos the photographer took to celebrate this couple’s special day were erased. You have to be super careful, especially if you’re working with someone else’s data.
In my customer’s situation, he had 30 years of photos stored on one hard drive. Now, he was taking steps to back them up, but he made a terrible mistake. Also, I’m on my eighth customer house fire since December 8th of 2025 — and that doesn’t count water damage, that doesn’t count theft. A great way to have a 3D chess move to get in front of a catastrophic situation like that is Backblaze. It’s $9 a month, and it’ll back up your Mac and it’ll back up all of your hard drives, as long as you include them in your Backblaze backup. If you want a free 30-day demo, just call the shop — we’ll send you a special code — or you can just go to backblaze.com.
Back up, again, and add a backup every few years just to make sure you’re super backed up. And remember, you have to have an offsite backup as well. If you have questions, just stop by the shop or give us a call — we’ll be happy to talk you through some very basic backup strategies to make sure you never lose your data.
