If you are reading this article, it’s likely because your Macbook Air or other Apple Mac laptop has started freezing up on you, or has slowed to a crawl and is grinding away, or you may even seem to be out of disk space. If any of these are your issue, a good place to start checking is with your Mac’s ‘mobile backups’, which, despite the name, aren’t backups for your mobile devices onto your Mac, but rather are backups that your portable computer (i.e. laptop) makes to itself when you are away from your Time Capsule or other backup drive.

If you have found that your Mac hard drive or Windows hard drive is suddenly nearly out of space (maybe you got the “Your startup disk is almost full” message), and if you have an iPhone that you connect to iTunes, your iPhone backups may be the culprit. Here’s how to find your iPhone backups, and what to do about it.

You may have noticed that there was no new article on The Internet Patrol yesterday.

That’s because my hard drive crashed, which meant that a) I had no way to write and post an article, and b) I spent all day dealing with a dead computer. Long-time readers will remember that the same thing happened to me last year, and may wonder if I’d learned my lesson. You bet I did. And now I’m going to talk to you about why you need a redundant backup system, with a portable backup device as well as an online backup solution.