According to Apple, today is OS X Mountain Lion release day, which means tomorrow will be “OH GOD MY HARD DRIVE JUST WENT TO CRAP AND I’VE LOST EVERYTHING” day for quite a few people. Here are some facts: hard drives sometimes die; installs—especially for entire operating systems—can go horribly wrong; data is very easy to lose. To be fair, relatively few people suffer from such problems, but that won’t be comforting if you lose all your movies/music/photos/email/documents.

Here’s one more fact: if you back-up and/or clone your Mac, each data copy reduces the likelihood of permanent data loss. And another: doing so is relatively inexpensive and not that difficult.

My advice when it comes to a new version of OS X is much the same as it was last year: buy an external hard drive (which can cost as little as £40) and ensure you at the very least have a full back-up of your Mac before upgrading to Mountain Lion. If possible, I recommend using software that clones your Mac’s hard drive rather than simply backing up the data, because that leaves you with a bootable drive if something goes very wrong. (Time Machine does enable data restoration, but the back-up drive itself is not bootable.) The steps are:

1. Format your drive using Disk Utility

Launch Disk Utility and select the back-up drive from the sidebar. At the foot of the window, check its Partition Map Scheme is GUID Partition Table, which will enable you to use the disk to start-up an Intel Mac. If it shows something else, click ‘Partition’, select ‘1 Partition’ from the ‘Volume Scheme’ menu, click ‘Options’ and select ‘GUID Partition Table’. Click ‘OK’. Name the volume using the ‘Name’ field and then click ‘Apply’ to reformat your disk.

Use either SuperDuper! ($27.95) or Carbon Copy Cloner ($39.95) to clone your Mac. If using SuperDuper!, select your Mac’s hard drive from the ‘Copy’ menu and your back-up drive from the ‘to’ menu. Select ‘Backup – all files’ from the ‘using’ menu. Click ‘Copy Now’. If using Carbon Copy Cloner, select your Mac’s drive from the ‘Source Disk’ menu and the back-up drive from the ‘Target Disk’ menu. Click ‘Clone’. The process may take several hours and it’s best to not have any active apps running (i.e. do not work on projects and save things, nor download anything while the initial clone is being made).

3. Reboot and test

Once the clone is complete, restart your Mac while holding the Option key (also labelled ‘Alt’) and choose your back-up drive as the boot volume. It will take longer than usual for your Mac to start from this external drive. Ensure the back-up works: test some apps and launch some files. Once you’re done, reboot back into your Mac’s drive.

Should your Mountain Lion install not work, you now have a bootable clone that will enable you to continue working, or from which you can clone everything back to your Mac. However, once you have a clone, you should continue safeguarding your data daily by using incremental updating (whereby only files that have changed are cloned to the external volume). SuperDuper! refers to this feature as ‘Smart Update’, accessed in the main pane’s ‘Options’ button; Carbon Copy Cloner has an ‘Incremental backup of selected items’ setting within ‘Cloning options’. Both apps have automated scheduling capabilities.

As noted earlier, more back-ups and clones reduce risk, and so if you can afford it, use multiple cloning drives and switch them regularly. Add a Time Machine back-up alongside your clones. Also consider online back-up services such as CrashPlan. This might all seem a little paranoid, but for the sake of a couple of hard drives, a piece of OS X software, an online back-up service and a few hours of your time, your data will be as safe as it’s ever going to be. Really, that’s not paranoia, but common sense.

Analysts have reported a miss on their guesswork for Apple’s Q3 earnings. “Apple provides guidance every quarter, but we keep ignoring it and getting the final figures wrong,” said an interchangeable analyst. Another interchangeable analyst pointed to problems regarding context: “We hear there are ongoing problems in European economies, which strengthened the US dollar, and the new iPhone’s obviously on the way, but we never bother to factor such things into our figures,” she said. “Instead, we just take Apple’s guidance figures, add a small chunk and cross our fingers. But in again using what we thought was a foolproof method, we nonetheless managed another miss.”

A third interchangeable analyst told us while Apple had sold 26 million iPhones (a 28 per cent year-on-year increase), 17 million iPads (84 per cent), four million Macs (two per cent) and 6.8 million iPods (ten per cent down), he was expecting more, “just because, well, it’s Apple, right? I mean, those guys talk about their magical devices, so why can’t they magic more sales out of thin air, to match our guesswork? I just don’t understand it.”

Asked for comment, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said: “Those guys are fucking idiots. Every damn quarter we give them guidance, and every quarter they get more and more ‘confident’ about how much shit we’ll sell. I can’t believe anyone pays these people. How can they be so wrong so often and still in their damn jobs? It’s amazing they’re not all in government.”

Apple made more money than the same time last year, and more than its guidance said it would, but less than some ‘analysts’ pulling figures out of thin air—or using the high-end analytical technology known as ‘guessing’—thought it would. Apple’s hugely profitable quarter has therefore been labelled ‘disappointing’ by pretty much everyone, given that guessing is clearly more important than hard facts.

In other words, the same as every fairly recent Apple earnings call.

One of the UK’s Mac magazines, MacFormat, which I regularly write for, just unleashed its new digital version on the App Store. On the iPad, it uses the same underlying framework as the spiffy Tap! magazine, making for an entertaining and interactive experience. Hurrah! So, inevitably, people are already bitching about it on the App Store. Here are two choice one-star reviews:

4.99 for a digital version? They are pricing themselves out of the digital magazine market! I have contacted them personally about the pricing structure before. However they have not replied and seemingly not interested in what I have to say.

Gosh, I wonder why?

No paper cost, No press cost, No postage cost and it is £44.99
NO THANKS
If I subscribe the magazine version I get the magazine and the downloadable pdf to read on any computing device including iPad, now tel me why digital iPad version is so pricy. Yo must think Whether you are too cleaver or iPad users are so stupid.

Yeah, those MacFormat guys think they are far too ‘cleaver’ for us mere mortals, taking our cash and rolling around naked on £50 notes, laughing maniacally. Or perhaps, just perhaps, digital magazines actually cost money to produce too? Maybe, when it comes down to it, paper/printing/mailing isn’t actually such a massive chunk of production costs as wages, paid to the people that plan, write and edit each edition? Just possibly, there’s the teeny tiny issue of interactive content (videos, touch interfaces, ‘3D’ photography elements) actually taking time and therefore costing money to create? And, clearly, being a quid cheaper for a single issue than on the newsstand (or two-quid if you take out the rolling one-month subscription) is just wrong, too. At the very most, the magazine should obviously be free, because it’s created by magic editorial elves, who don’t need to eat and pay their mortgages. Really, MacFormat should be paying us a crisp tenner every time we download an issue, because, man, we paid for this expensive iPad hardware and, DAMMIT, we are entitled! We deserve free things! We don’t understand how magazines work and that people need to be paid! And so on!

Also, just to prove they’re entirely evil, MacFormat’s also gone half-price for a short period of time, giving you single issues for £2.49 and a year’s subscription for £24. Those utter, utter bastards.

UPDATE: I’m informed by MacFormat’s production editor that the half-price offer only relates to the current issue, which is £1.49 instead of £2.99. The £24 subscription—that’s a permanent deal, but wasn’t reflected in App Store details when the new issue went live.  Naturally, some people are still complaining that figure’s too high.

One of the things that currently annoys a lot of people about Apple is the way in which it constantly builds apps that resemble real-world items. iBooks has a background that resembles an open book, and Apple’s calendaring apps have leather stitching and torn paper at the top. In some cases, such design merely irks designers who like the minimalism Apple showcases in its hardware; occasionally, though, usability suffers. For example, the iBooks background never changes, and so while you can instinctively look at a real book and see how much is left to go, iBooks doesn’t help in this way; worse, Address Book for OS X apes a real book and ends up a total mess that’s far slower to work with than its predecessor.

Of late, a lot of people have been pointing to Microsoft as the superior company when it comes to interface design, citing the mostly very smart Windows 7 and Windows 8. The problem is, not all interface design scales, and when you go very minimal, interfaces can lose any sense of tactility and make it hard to focus. Peter Bright of Ars Technica’s shot of Office 2013 highlights that the opposite of Apple’s current design aesthetic isn’t necessarily any better. Acres of white space lead the eye to flick all over the design, making it hard to focus on the content (which is the smallish box on the right, with “This is an inline reply” in it). It’s unclear which components are buttons and which are content areas. Worse, there’s no sense of warmth at all. This feels like an email client designed to appeal to people bereft of emotion. In short, it’s every bit as horrible as Apple’s worst UI design, just in a very different way.