With Stuart having a transport problem, we had to cope without him, but decided to stick with the subject of backups with Mick in the chair. We opted to have each member tell us what they do regarding backing up. There was excellent participation by everyone and overall a pretty reassuring standard, ranging from relying on Apple’s built in backups via the cloud and IMAP for email accounts, Time Machine, a home file server, major reliance on DropBox as well as iCloud Drive. Whilst memory stick are a good way of keeping files secure in different places, the “expert” opinion was that really important file should also be backed up to the cloud. An addition to the life of memory sticks, Mick advised on the need to update hard drives which also wear. Euan pointed out that whilst mechanical hard drives usually give hints of beginning to fail SSD fail catastrophically. Several of us felt non-magnetic DVD have a lot going for them but Mick warned that that the technology will stop being supported.
The coffee break continued to the end of the meeting with one-to-one or small groups dealing with Apple problems and generally socialising.
