Save Me: What To Do Before There’s A Crash On Your Mac.

I got the incentive to buy an extra hard drive to backup my Mac when Tera asked, ‘How will you feel if you turn on your Mac and the hard drive is dead?’

The answer to that question prompted a sober response. So it is with data crashes. I was at my parent’s place over the holidays and used their Mac to finish up a lengthy report. It had been raining, and the lights flickered a few times. No problem. Dad has one of those healthy surge protector battery backups, so I trudged ahead on my 17 page document.

You know what’s about to happen, right? It did.

I made a number of edits on many different pages through the night. And, yes, I saved the document. From time to time.

Somewhere around 9:15 PM I settled in to finish up the document and made a few dozens changes, rewrote some paragraphs, edited others, and deleted a few sentences here and there, and then made some changes in the format; fonts, headings, etc.

I was proud of myself as the document started to look great. At that point it was about 10:30 and I was ready for another break.

Before I could even think of hitting the keys Command-S, the lights went out. My Mac’s screen was blank. It was dark. I was not happy. What happened to the battery backup?

Seems as though dad had switched it to another computer because the power went out a few nights earlier.

Over an hour of edits to my document had just disappeared because I was too busy, you know, editing the silly thing.

I know you’re supposed to ‘save’ every so many minutes but I just got busy. It’s not the first time it’s happend, but it may be the last.

When talking to Tera on the phone I asked her if she’d ever had a similar problem. The woman has had at least one of every problem on earth since Pandora opened the box.

Tera said, ‘Save Me.’ I said, ‘Uh huh. I’ll save you as soon as I can figure out how to prevent that from happening again.’ Again, Tera said, ‘Save Me’

‘Honey, are you OK?’ I was beginning to sense a little ‘Field of Dreams’ deja’vu all over again.

Tera’s version of ‘Save Me’ is really GoldfishSoft’s SaveMe.

SaveMe is substantially less than an iBook or a PowerBook (see, the power can go off and the laptops keep working for awhile; and, unlike the power company, usually give you a warning when power is about gone), and can be as valuable as the last hour of your document’s edits and changes.

All Save Me does is run in the background and auto-save to virtually any Mac OS X program on the planet, nearby planets, and other dimensions.

You tell it how often you want your files saved, which application to do the saving, and then SaveMe does that. Expensive applications like Microsoft Word do that.

Did I mention that Microsoft Word is expensive? So is SaveMe. $20 shareware.

The GoldfishSoft developers are handy with utilities like SaveMe and it’s already ready to go when the Intel-based Macs are introduced at Macworld in January (I’ve got my fingers crossed and have committed $20 to Bambi’s $20 that that’ll happen).

Other than the complexity of building the application in the first place, SaveMe does what truly decent Mac applications do; they sit there and work.

You set up auto-save preferences for each appllication on your Mac. Every five minutes for Photoshop, but every 10 minutes for Dreamweaver. That kind of thing.

Or, every two minutes for everything.

SaveMe resides in the Mac OS X Menu Bar so it’s easy to find. Is this worth having on your Mac?

Yes. Why it’s not already built in is beyond me, but maybe Apple does it to keep the developer community developing Mac applications.

Regardless, an hour of time is easily worth that much. Since it happens often enough, it’ll pay for itself many times over in just a year.

Click Here for more details and the download link. Try before you buy.

Tera Patricks
I told you so, Alex. Stop worrying about Intel iBooks in January and get yourself a laptop. In the meantime, ‘SaveMe.’

Carol Mary Miller
Lifesaver. Frank Petrie of Macsimum News calls SaveMe a ‘one trick pony.’ It is. It’s a great trick.

Jack D. Miller
Alexis, I give you credit for finding little jewels like this, but don’t you think $20 is a bit much for a ‘one trick pony’ (thanks, Carol)?

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

Off Topic #6 - The MacHeist is back. In case you missed it a few months ago, MacHeist is a great way for Mac users to get 12 top Mac applications and utilities for $49. Many of these have been reviewed on Mac360, so we highly recommend that you take a look. The value, what you get for what you pay, is remarkable. Click Here to look, buy, download.

Off Topic #58 - Do politicians use personal computers? Of course. We’ve heard Barack Obama prefers a Mac, while Hillary Clinton uses a Dell, though, apparently neither of the candidates can bowl. Does Obama’s potential vice president use a Mac? Even Clinton acknowledges Apple’s brand power but says she can’t afford a Mac. Maybe she’d win if she used a Mac.