I’ve been battling a pesky case of missing symbols when debugging on iOS-based devices lately. It only started when I upgraded to Xcode 4. I was beginning to think I’d be symbolicating by hand until Apple sorted things out — fear not, I’ve found a workaround!
After the gushing “Thankyou, Backblaze” post from earlier today, I thought it might be of some interest to others how I backup my Mac (like an elephant — hooo, I tied in a photo of my travels again!).
I consider backing up to be common sense these days. If you use your Mac for work or for play, you have information that you’d be upset were it to disappear. Not backing up is the computing equivalent of driving without a seatbelt: you might not have an accident today, but you’ll be thankful for it when you do.
I had one of those ‘cold shivers running down your spine’ moments this week, when a simple Dropbox problem wiped out an entire client Xcode project. I’m not entirely sure why it happened — I assume because of my constant rebooting between Snow Leopard and Lion (and subsequently ‘out-of-time’ file dates), but by the time I realised what was going on, neither Dropbox nor Time Machine had a copy of the files. Had I not set up three levels of backups, I might as well have been burning incense to the gods to get my data back (did you like that? I tied the pretty photo I took to the words on your screen!).
Thankfully, Backblaze was far more thorough than either of these services and 5 minutes after running through the online restore wizard I had a full copy of the project on my hard drive, and was knee deep in code again. Thankyou, Backblaze — you saved me stress and time, and the $5 (well, $4-something Australia) per month to backup my Mac is something I will not question again.
If you rely on your Mac professionally, and you keep anything remotely important on there please take the time to verify the integrity of your back-ups.