When my hard drive failed twice on my iMac I had to take it to the Apple store to get it repaired under warranty. This could have been disastrous, not so much from a financial point of view, but from a productivity point of view—I could have lost literally years' worth of work.

Think of how much we store on our computers these days: our entire digital lives. Computers are used increasingly for things that used to be done in the analog world. We use iPhoto to store our treasured family snapshots. We rely on iMovie to edit our family videos. Our Macs store dozens (or maybe hundreds) of passwords and login items. We count on our Macs to take care of the thousands of documents we create.

As Internet marketers and anyone who uses a Mac in business, the situation is even more critical. Our entire livelihood depends on our digital files. In a hard drive failure, it is possible to lose years of work and hundreds or thousands of dollars in revenue because of the time we need to devote to re-creating our work.

Obviously, a reliable backup regimen is essential for anyone who uses a computer in business.

Time Machine

Fortunately, the Mac has a number of built-in tools that make it easy to maintain a regular backup, but only if you have a reliable external drive to which to backup your files.

At the time of my hard drive failure, my Mac was connected to an older 250 GB external hard drive that I had been using previously with my older Macintosh. It wasn’t capable of backing up more than half of my Mac's built in 500 GB hard drive, but since my internal hard drive was less than half full, it was adequate to the task. (Since then I've bought a capacious 1TB drive for backups.)

After each hard drive failure, when I brought my Mac back home, I simply plugged in my backup drive and let Time Machine do its thing. After a while, my Mac was exactly the way it had been before the failure. Exactly. It was as if nothing had ever happened. I hadn’t lost a single file or document, not a single preference setting, not a single tweak I had made to my system. Everything was exactly as it was before.

My advice: While Time Capsule is the crème de la crème of backup devices, if you're on a budget there are any number of third-party external hard drives that will do the job, although perhaps not wirelessly.