Greetings Friends,

I hope everyone had a happy and safe Memorial Day weekend! I spent the long weekend breaking in the camping gear with my family as we officially kicked off our summer camping season. It was a little bit chilly, but we still made the best of it! It is nice to spend a weekend relaxing and just enjoying time together. We even managed to survive an entire weekend without cell phones or internet! With all the technology around us, and working with it on a daily basis, I admit it’s a great feeling to disconnect and recharge for a few days. 

This past week I encountered a few machines which were suffering from data corruption. Data corruption can be a very tedious and frustrating process to sort through, in some cases it can actually mean loss of files. Data corruption can not always be avoided, but there are some simple steps you can take when using your machine to try and reduce the likely hood of data corruption. One is to try to avoid force powering down your machine; whenever possible always follow proper shut down and sleep procedures. Avoid force quitting programs as well as just unplugging external drives unless it’s absolutely necessary; force quitting your programs and unplugging drives without properly un-mounting them can lead to data corruption. If you have a program that is crashing on a regular basis, this can be a sign that potentially data corruption had occurred. If you are noticing crashes within your programs, try repairing permission on your disk through disk utility. Installing a solid state hard drive can running regular Time Machine backups is another simple step and precaution one can take to try and minimize any potential corruption to your data. Solid state drives are much more stable than traditional drives. Lastly, keeping your Time Machine backups current could be a real life saver in the event your data does get corrupted. Time Machine allows users to restore from specific back ups. This was a lifesaver for me once with a Windows partition on my machine that ended up with a virus. Thanks to Time Machine I was able to restore data prior to the virus infecting my machine! 

Thank you for reading!
Emily Dolloff
emily@smalldog.com