These are the kinds of things that need to have advanced plans. There is no time to do it during or after the fact.

Backups for your Backups

Time Machine, Super Duper, Chrono Sync, and Crash Plan (off site).

Consider an "emergency" pack for your electronics with extra cables, cords, power supplies. That way you can just grab and go on hard drives and computers.

An off-site solution is critical in case of theft, out of town, not enough time, or just too dangerous to try and grab your gear.

Going paperless

I am now scanning 100% of my critical paperwork

Goes into paperless and is stored in an encrypted disk image that is part of my backups.

We also have an emergency "briefcase" file for critical docs. Insurance policies, birth certificates, social security cards, etc.

Know thy passwords

I have all mine in 1Password which syncs with Dropbox and is in my backup schedule.

I know some people who will have a printed copy in a safe deposit box or other secured location.

Have a partner

Make sure a spouse or parent knows your systems and how to access and use them

This is key if you are injured or unavailable

This is fairly obvious in the case of theft or physical loss

What about failures. Crashed hard drive, failed logic board, etc. i.e. Mac won’t boot.

Mac locked up

Wait it out. Go have some coffee or something.

If it’s not responding, press and hold the power button for 5-10 seconds until it shuts down

Reboot

It’s amazing how sometimes just a restart can fix things

After it’s back up, then look are error logs, run Disk Utility, etc.

Also consider running a tool like Onxy or Cocktail to clean out system logs, caches, etc.

Won’t Boot Up

Disconnect all accessories

If you are having wake from sleep issues, fans running on high a lot, power issues, try resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)

If you have 3rd party memory installed, remove and replace with original RAM

Boot into Single User Mode and run 'fsck’. Hold down Commend+S on startup.

Try booting into Recovery mode. Hold down Command+R on startup

Will boot in Recovery

Try running Disk Utility. Once started up, choose 'Disk Utility'. Then check and repair your boot drive if necessary

Other tools

Disk Warrior

Drive Genius

If none of the usual stuff is working, then contact Apple or local Apple authorized service center

Even if you don’t have AppleCare

They can give you a quote and let you know what to do.

What if they need to take it in?

You have backup, right?

Be prepared that they might replace your hard drive and to give them your admin passwords

If you have private or sensitive data and if you can remove or protect that before you go in for service.

Change admin password, so you don’t have to give them your private credentials.

Remove any 3rd party upgrades, in case they need to replace the parts

I got my RAM back, but there was no guarantee

If you’re lucky it might be something simple and they can do the repair on site. Or better yet they replace your device.

Loner or temporary machine

Business owners can join Join Venture and get loners if repairs take more than 24 hours

If you’re lucky enough to have another Mac in the house you can use a bootable clone or restore from backup onto the other Mac.

Using backup data on different Mac

Depending on the backup it may or may not be 100% in sync.

May want to turn off existing backup schedules. (Clone, Time Machine, Cloud)

Set up new "temporary" backup schemes while your Mac is being serviced

I used a dis k image on my Drobo with a Super Duper clone.

Extra hard drive for Time Machine?

I also let my Crash Plan and Chrono sync continue to update

Different hardware might has issues

One I found was that many items are tied to the hardware ID

My iCloud account had to be re-authorized.

"Inherit" Time Machine backup, you can no longer use with the old Mac.

Many of my apps wanted to be re-registered.

If your back wasn’t 100% current then you need to be aware of out of sync data

In my case I hand copied some of my critical folders from a more recent Time Machine backup

Simply browsed the Time Machine’s Backup.backupbd/[Computer-Name]/Latest folder.

You could also use Migration Assistant to restore to a temporary Mac, assuming it’s not being used for other purposes.

So what do you do once the repairs are done and your Mac is back?

Basically a lot of the stuff you did to set up your temp Mac, but in reverse.

Clone from temp backup

If your repaired Mac still has it’s old HDD

In my case, because I was booted off a temp Super Duper clone and all my updated files were on that, I simply cloned back.

If you were doing a Time Machine backup of the temporary Mac then you could use re-install OS X and recover using Migration Assistant

Starting from scratch

If it’s a new Mac or new HDD, then re-install the OS and recover from backups.

If your only data is on remote backup, like Crash Plan, then it will take a while to download all the old data. You might consider their "Restore-To-Door" service

Re-enable things

Again you might need to re-enter iCloud passwords, software licenses, configurations, etc.

Re-enable any old backups you temporarily disabled and confirm they are working again.

Check syncing services like Dropbox.

If you use DHCP reservations then those may need to be reset