Joseph Schmitt, taking a cue from Federico Viticci of MacStories, has figured out a way to control a Mac with a Pebble smartwatch. Combining Keyboard Maestro for the Mac with Command-C for iPad, Schmitt demonstrates opening his frontmost Safari tab on his iPad. He has also figured out how to use his Pebble to pause or resume Backblaze backups, restart iTunes, and restart Hazel.

Most of the topics in this book address ways of protecting your data in one fashion or another. But in this chapter, we change gears to address two key pieces of data security — preventing loss and theft of your data while it’s stored on your Mac.

In this week’s ExtraBITS, Adam Engst discussed the Mac’s 30th anniversary with Gene Steinberg on the Tech Night Owl Live podcast, and Matt Neuburg talked iOS programming with Chuck Joiner on MacVoices. LogMeIn announced the end of its free service tier, PCWorld explained mechanical keyboards in detail, and Backblaze released another fascinating hard drive reliability study. Finally, in a disturbing turn of events, the FBI was called to interrogate a man who wore Google Glass to a movie theater.

Cloud backup service Backblaze has conducted another study of hard drive reliability, this time pitting consumer-grade hard drives against the more expensive enterprise-level disks. Over the span of three years, 4.2 percent of the consumer drives failed, while the enterprise drives suffered a 4.6 percent failure rate. The caveats are that Backblaze tested 14,719 consumer-grade drives against 368 enterprise drives, and the two sets were used for different purposes. While more data is needed to compare longer-term reliability, Backblaze noted that longer warranties are the one clear advantage of enterprise drives.

Just how long will your hard drive last? Cloud backup service Backblaze, which relies upon consumer-grade hard drives, performed a study of 25,000 hard drives over four years. The good news is that 74 percent of the drives survived four years. The drives had a 5.1 percent annual failure rate in the first 1.5 years, which dropped to 1.4 percent in the next 1.5 years, then spiked to 11.8 percent after that. Backblaze expects that over half the drives will last six years. Regardless, all drives die eventually, so backups are still a must.

This week, Michael Cohen’s “Take Control of Pages” pre-book received a major update, Jean MacDonald left Smile for a higher calling, a mad genius learned to control his Mac with a smartwatch, Joe Kissell and Jeff Carlson both appeared on MacVoices, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer decided to retire, and Apple began rolling out its CarPlay automotive integration system.

We’re back from Thanksgiving break (sorry for forgetting to warn you of our week off!) with a heaping helping of ExtraBITS. Google has made it easier to move away from Gmail and Google Calendar, President Obama revealed that he’s not allowed to have an iPhone, the value of enterprise hard drives has been questioned, and developer Matt Gemmell explains why one device doesn’t fit all. Apple’s restrictions are putting a chokehold on Smile’s TextExpander touch, there’s a new guide to writing on the go, an Esquire reporter broke the rules of Google Glass to see what would happen, and we have more behind-the-scenes stories from Apple Geniuses.

This week, Apple quietly released the iPad mini with Retina display, we find out how long hard drives last, and, in a pair of podcasts, Sharon Zardetto, author of “Take Control of iBooks,” joins host Chuck Joiner on MacVoices and Adam Engst talks about Mavericks with host Gene Steinberg on the Tech Night Owl Live.

With the rise of fast solid-state storage that doesn’t offer much room for data and Macs that don’t let you swap out their hard drives, external drives have become essential in the Mac world. But are you treating yours well? Josh Centers offers some advice on keeping your hard drive and its data healthy.

Connected Data’s Transporter device lets you sync and share files, and even access them from an iOS device, without using cloud storage. Joe Kissell tested it and found that it works as advertised, but isn’t for everyone.

Our always-chatty computers and mobile devices have an all-you-can-eat mentality that can be wildly inappropriate when we’re either in a low-bandwidth situation or when we’re trying to keep bandwidth usage in budget or under a cap. We detail strategies for restricting your bandwidth diet.

MozyHome no longer offers unlimited online backup storage—and has raised prices, too.

The new system-wide Auto Save feature of Mac OS X Lion is great for most people, but what about those of us who have taught ourselves to press Command-S reflexively in order to avoid losing work when applications crash? Many Tricks’s Lioness has a solution.

Although Adam Engst has designated every Friday the 13th as Verify Your Backups Day, this Thursday the 31st is also an important day for your data: World Backup Day. If you already back up regularly, be sure to check your backups, and if you don't, there's no better day to start — especially since online backup providers SpiderOak and Backblaze are offering special promotional pricing through 31 March 2011, plus a chance to win free storage.

Thursday, March 31st has been dubbed World Backup Day, and a bunch of online backup providers have special deals in the works.