If your MacBook breaks, do you know where the files stored on it go?

As wonderful as Google Docs and Spreadsheets are, they're not perfect. Sometimes document layouts are too intense to be easily managed with web based tools. Sometimes people have a lot of time and intellectual capital invested in formats that don't play well with web based tools, so programs like ExamView, Word, Numbers, Pages, Excel, and others continue to fill an important roll. Sometimes people just hate Google Docs and want to use Word. In my travels throughout the district, I've seen just how important some of the applications that run on faculty MacBooks are. To varying degrees, teachers are productive with local applications that run on the Mac, and for some, there are no practical 'Google' or other online alternatives. There's no shame in using a legacy or local application if it is helping kids learn or helping you do your job.

About a week ago, it occurred to me that within this district, there is a problem with using local applications, though. Late one evening, I exchanged a flurry of emails with a teacher who lost her Numbers gradebook. Keep in mind that Numbers and other programs that run directly from your MacBook typically save files to the local drive on the MacBook. Something had gone wrong with her Mac, and the Numbers file was simply gone. Was there a backup? No! Later that same week, I helped another teacher rescue content -years of content, in fact - from a flash drive that was about to go the giant flash drive pile at the central landfill. Fortunately, we were able to rescue her files. For the teacher who lost her Numbers gradebook, the outcome was not a happy one. She'll be reentering a lot of grades from memory or paper.

You will never, ever regret having a good backup of your data. But who among us is interested in taking the time to back things up on a regular basis, or ever, for that matter? Crickets....

I encourage you to consider your use of local 'on the MacBook' programs and am suggesting that you use Google Drive to painlessly, effortlessly, and automatically backup your local data to the Google Drive cloud. Should disaster land on your MacBook, you can simply pick up the next available device and your files will seamlessly restore from the Google Drive backup.

Please consider the directions in the embedded presentation. Between the presentation and PD opportunities, EWG should be able to meet a goal of No Teacher Ever Losing Data. Don't wait until next month. Don't wait until April, May, or June. Don't wait for your MacBook to break, get lost, or fall victim to some rare computing malady. Set up Google Drive to work for you today. You'll be happy knowing that a backup of your content is happening automatically. If after giving the directions in the embedded presentation a try you still have questions, please contact me.

UPDATE:  11/24/2014
Even Apple Fans are cautioning against MacBook hard drive failure, and are exhorting users to have good backups.