Happy Tuesday,

With exams ending for college students, we’re preparing for the annual rush to get those nagging computer problems repaired after the semester is over. This time of year usually brings in a high volume of liquid spill victims, but more and more we see smaller issues coming in. It seems that many people hold off on non-essential repairs—broken optical drives, cracking top cases and the like—until their computers aren’t a required part of their lives. Vacation is the perfect time to get these kinds of things fixed.

We’ve added Drobos to our tech rooms to house customer backups. We’d been using Mac Pro models with four hard drives internally and four externally (for backing up the backups!) for some time, but we find the fast and secure Drobos to be an excellent upgrade. Drobos are unique in that you can remove a drive at any time and pop in a higher-capacity drive for more space without any downtime. Should one drive fail, the array will be unaffected. Even if two drives fail, the data will be safe.

We spend a lot of time backing up customers’ computers before repairs, and while I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: if you’re not backing up your data, you will eventually lose all of it. It’s a terrible thing to have a customer tell you their baby photos are gone forever because they didn’t back them up.

Happy holidays,

Matt
matt@smalldog.com