I’m Patrick Norton from TekThing and I’m here on Digital Trends today to tell you the right way to back up your data!
Doesn’t matter if we’re talking business data, baby pics, your college thesis, or all the music you bought on iTunes … if your hard drive dies, it’s gone!
No worries, you say, you backed it up on a USB drive? That’s a great start — but what if that thumb drive is in the bag with your laptop, and it gets stolen? Or there’s a house fire that takes out your desktop AND that external drive you had the copies stashed on? Sound paranoid? Just ask anybody that’s been through a hurricane, tornado, flood, earthquake, or, well, you get the idea.
Disasters, natural or otherwise, are the reasons IT pros follow the 3-2-1 backup rule: Make three copies, on at least two different media – like the drive on your machine and a USB drive — with at least one copy stored offsite.
If you’re backing up files to an external drive, you’re doing more than most folks. The next step is to get a copy stashed somewhere else. You might be capable of keeping a couple of backups, one at say, Grandma’s house or in a safe deposit box, but it’s a lot easier to use a secure online storage service like Dropbox or Box. They’ll automatically sync a folder full of your files “‘in the cloud,” which is a fluffy way of saying in a data center full of servers somewhere you aren’t.
My personal favorite technique is downloading and installing backup software like CrashPlan or Carbonite. I like CrashPlan because you can use it for free to back up to a local drive, another computer that you trust, say, at your parent’s house, or, for a modest fee, CrashPlan Central’s cloud storage. It takes a while for online services to back all your data up; your Internet connection can only move so maybe megabytes per minute in the end. But these servcies run automatically in the background, and, unlike me, they never forget to back up your files.
Online file services make it easy to share files too, or access anywhere you can get on the Internet.
So if you have files you can’t afford to lose, do yourself a favor, and get your own 3-2-1 backup plan rolling!
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.