On Friday I took the train to the Bay Area with my daughter, and my metal water bottle in my backup leaked and one edge of my MacBook Pro got a little wet… and it’s now at the Apple Repair Center being repaired. Don’t worry about your files, I had a current back up of everything!
Here are some of the lessons I learned about liquid spills in a MacBook:
- Never let your laptop come within a few feet of liquid of any kind. I am going to order a water proof sleeve for my laptop to use when I am traveling. While I used to sit on the couch and drink tea and work on my laptop, I will never do that again… ever.
- The fastest and easiest way to make an Apple Genius Bar appointment is by using the Apple Store App. You can see openings at multiple stores in case you are willing to drive anywhere.
- Apple will ship your laptop to your house after repairing it, free of charge. Just ask.
- The cost to repair a liquid spill is a flat fee price based on the model of your laptop. So a drop of liquid costs the same as an entire drink.
- The flat fee for my MacBook Pro Retina was $755.
- Apple Care does not cover liquid spills. They are considered an out-of-warranty repair.
- Your credit card company may offer extended warranties for anything purchased using their card. Thank you Chase Ink Plus for covering my entire out-of-warranty incident.
- Time machine and backups are essential, and not backing up is like having sex without birth control… great if you are prepared for a child, but know there are natural consequences.
If you are interested here is our MacBook backup system:
- We run daily backups to time machine using a usb drive. There are days I don’t back up, but never more than a week.
- Then once a month we back up each computer to a different drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. This is a nice insurance policy if you don’t trust time machine. Plus, it is a different type of backup, and drives can fail, so think of it as double insurance.
- We store our monthly back up drives outside of our house. That way if our house burns down, or our laptops or drives are stolen, we haven’t lost more than 30 days of files.
- When we travel with our laptops, we bring our usb drives, and run a current back up on our offsite drives before we go. While on the road, we separate laptops and backups so they are always in different suitcases.
- We upload all our favorite photos to our Amazon Cloud Drive. You can upload UNLIMITED photos for free if you have Amazon prime account. That alone is worth the fee!
- I pay $9.99 a month for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom in the cloud, and use Lightroom to organize all my photos.
- Then, I connect Lightroom to Amazon photo storage so I can automatically upload my photos. This gives me an in-the-cloud, and third, backup of all my photos.