Last week, my MacBook Pro went dead. The computer started up fine, but the screen remained black. It was as if the lights were on, but nobody was home.

After a brief look on the Apple discussion forum on my iPhone, I found the problem to likely be a faulty graphics chip – part of the logic board. The diagnosis was clear at the Genius Bar at Westfield – replace the logic board. Duration: 2 weeks.

2 weeks without my Mac – disaster! I’ve got quite a few projects on at the moment with deadlines that week. After pacing around the store I found only one solution: I had to buy a new Mac. I found the funds and settled on a standard iMac – buying another laptop wasn’t an option.

Thankfully, I’d been a good little boy and backed-up often using Time Machine, so all I had to do was quickly run back home with the new iMac and plugin it into the backup drive. I’ve never had to rely on a backup before and this method of restoring from a backup was brilliant. After 2 hours I was back up and running.

There’s a lesson here and I’d like to impart it to all of you – to maybe save you from the stress and financial worry I went through:

Backup isn’t enough – you need to have access to a backup computer.

My Dad summed it up well at the time. He said:

Equipment is cheap. It may not seem like that now, but compared to your time and expertise, a new computer is cheap.

Amen to that.

So avoid a potential catastrophe – get yourself a backup computer.