Here’s a friendly reminder from a near victim of data loss to back your data up. Yes, you’ve probably heard this before and maybe you’ve even got a Time Machine backup or something similar plugged into your computer. Maybe you’ve got most of your stuff in Drobox or somewhere in the Google Cloud. But what would happen if you walked downstairs one Saturday morning, poured a cup of coffee and walked into your office to discover your machine booted into the recovery partition with the horrific message “no bootable device found.”

Well that happened to me last weekend. Without any kind of warning or advanced symptoms the internal drive on my beloved ca. 2013 iMac Pro just…died. Given my line of work I pondered the best way to get in, move data, perhaps reformat everything and hopefully it would work again.

While making pancakes I nervously logged into my BackBlaze account and got hopeful news…the last full backup had completed at 10:30 the night before. My mind achieved calm and my mind went to how I would replace the iMac instead of worrying about data recovery. BackBlaze is $6. That’s it. Hope you never need their services, but be very happy that you made a pretty slim investment when you do.