Hard drives die. My mother learned this the hard way.
Her 7-year-old trusty white-polycarbonate Apple iMac became unresponsive early one morning, and she feared the worst. Her local Mac shop confirmed it: The internal drive storing all her data was toast.
Fortunately, I had prepared for this day as Mom’s unofficial IT guy, a sort of back-up tech helper to the professional assistance she gets at her Mac shop.
As a result, little of her data was irretrievably lost. And once she had purchased a current-model aluminum iMac, getting her back up and running was relatively painless.
This column describes the various tech tools and methods I have used to protect my mom from catastrophic data loss and to ensure her recovery from a hard-drive crash doesn’t take forever.
I didn’t do this alone; here’s a shout-out to Diane, a crack tech staffer at the Mac shop, who was a lifesaver when we needed her.
Remote access. This was the key first step. Because Mom and I live thousands of miles apart, I need to access her computer over the Internet to work on it as if it were sitting in front of me.
This was an impossibility in the recent past when my folks, who live in a somewhat remote New England village, were on pokey dial-up. Recently installed 1.6-megabit-per-second DSL service is a game changer. Though slow compared with my Comcast-based broadband, it’s plenty speedy for me to deploy one of my all-time-favorite tech tools, LogMeIn Free.
This is a service that allows me to access any of the computers under my control — Mac and PC — from anywhere, provided I have a reliable Internet connection. I am able to log in to my iMac at home from a MacBook Air or a Windows portable at the office or in a cafe with Wi-Fi, say. Heck, I can even log in to the iMac via apps on an iPhone, an iPad or an Android smartphone or tablet.
To make this happen, I need only install free LogMeIn software on all of the computers I have to access remotely. That included Mom’s old iMac a while back — and I had been tinkering with the computer ever since to keep it running smoothly and ensure it was properly backed up.
Web email. Years ago, I purchased a domain name for my parents — it is theirsurname.com — and associated it with Google Apps services that include domain-name-customized Gmail email.
This was a critical safeguard because their specialized version of Gmail, just like the generic or vanilla variety, is Web-centric and therefore safe from computer failures. So when my mother’s hard drive crashed, she lost no mail since copies of all messages are stored online.
My mother was only vaguely aware of this since she accessed her email via the Apple Mail desktop application, as she always had, but Google was keeping her electronic correspondence safe behind the scenes. I had seen to that.
Backups. My parents’ computing activities are relatively modest and generate little in the way of gigantic files. It’s mostly text documents, spreadsheets, medium-resolution digital photos and the like. So making sure these were backed up wasn’t difficult.
First, I signed up my parents for a free Dropbox account. The service created a folder on their computer that looks like any other folder, but with a key difference: Anything that is dropped into the folder gets backed up online, automatically.
I made this Dropbox folder a master repository for all my parents’ documents and spreadsheets created with Apple’s old AppleWorks software. I then created a shortcut to that folder on the Mac desktop so my folks would have access to their stuff without realizing they were using Dropbox. That’s how transparent the service is.
The contents of my folks’ old iMac were being safeguarded in a couple of other ways. The Mac Time Machine feature was continually backing up the iMac’s contents to an external hard drive. And, for good measure, I’d manually drag over critical files, such as photo libraries, to the external drive every so often.
In fact, I had backed up my parents’ entire digital-picture collection in this way (not to mention the photos they had archived to DVD data discs, which have finite lifespans) just a week before the hard-drive failure.
The recovery. So when my mother’s hard-drive croaked, the path to recovery was clear. Since her old Mac had been backing itself up via Time Machine, it was easy for Diane at the Mac shop to essentially replicate the contents of the old hard drive on the drive in my mother’s replacement iMac.
I still had to do a ton of tweaking on the new computer to get my mother fully operational. There were major differences between the new Mac and the old Mac, including a newer version of the Mac OS X operating system with radical changes. Her trusty AppleWorks wouldn’t work on the new Mac, so I had to get her moving with the software’s present-day equivalent, Apple’s iWork.
Here is where I ran into a problem. Such tweaking is trivial for me via LogMeIn. But I had to get LogMeIn operational on the machine before I could proceed, and verbally walking Mom through the somewhat complicated and confusing steps for accomplishing this proved challenging. It is not entirely my mother’s fault; LogMeIn needs to make this less of a hassle.
After several fruitless hours with rising stress, we gave up and delegated this little duty to Diane, who took possession of the computer at her shop and got LogMeIn installed and set up with my account in a jiffy.
Then I was off. I downloaded and installed apps, including Dropbox, iWork modules Pages and Numbers, and Mailplane, a Google-friendly mail app to replace Apple’s not-as-Google-ish Mail. I roamed hither and yon in Mac OS X, making tweaks here and there to render the experience for my mother and father as simple and straightforward as possible.
I was doing all of it while the iMac was still in the Mac shop, to the amusement and amazement of staffers looking on as the computer was seemingly controlled by a ghost. At one point, Diane advised my dad to postpone picking up the computer, telling him I was LogMeIn-ing up a storm.
Since then, my mother pings me on a daily basis with one little crisis or confusion after another, which I can resolve in a heartbeat by taking control of her cursor and showing her what to do. At some point, she will get the hang of her new machine and I will not hear from her quite as often.
But I’m glad I can help her with lightning speed and efficiency when required — even if she has a major emergency, such as another hard-drive crash.
Julio Ojeda-Zapata writes about consumer technology. Read him: twincities.com/techtestdrive and yourtechweblog.com. Reach him: jojeda@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5467. Follow him: ojezap.com/social
