HARD DRIVE FAILURE

Well, I am back from the dead. My laptop is anyway. About two weeks ago, I was going on a road trip. I was doing some buisness, seeing family and attending the 2008 FIA show in Chicago. So the night before I left , I backed up my laptop, loaded up my laptop with everything I will need for the trip.

So everything was going smoothly, and I thought it was going to be a nice trip, and then the first time I powered up my laptop…

Blue screen….

Argh. My laptop was dead. I have a Apple, which does not blue screen often, but when it does,it is pretty bad. It means there is a problem with the operating system. So my first stop was the Apple store. After a few days of camping at the Apple store everyday, I had my laptop back. Still functionally dead however.

Turns out my hard drive was dying and was starting to having bad sectors. When I loaded up my laptop, I apparently moved something from the operating system onto one of these bad sectors causing the blue screen. Apple said that I did not have enough bad sectors to warrant a hard drive change, and even if they did, they would only replace it with a hard drive of the same size.

RECOVERY

Do I believe this story? Don’t know , seems far fetched to me, but my laptop was dead, and now it is sort of dead. They managed to get an older copy of the OSX installed , but I could not access my files. ( Long story ) They also had to delete a lot of things I needed to make room when they were working on it. My laptop had turned into a very expensive paperweight/boat anchor.

My backup was back at home, so I really couldn’t use it for the rest of the trip. Luckily, I do hourly backups. Yes, hourly. I use Tine machine, and here is a little blurb from the website that can explain it better than I could.

Anatomy of a backup.

For the initial backup, Time Machine copies the entire contents of the computer to your backup drive. It copies every file exactly (without compression), skipping caches and other files that aren’t required to restore your Mac to its original state. Following the initial backup, Time Machine makes only incremental backups — copying just the files that have changed since the previous backup. Time Machine creates links to any unchanged files, so when you travel back in time you see the entire contents of your Mac on a given day.

Timing is everything.

Every hour, every day, an incremental backup of your Mac is made automatically as long as your backup drive is attached to your Mac. Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month. Only files created and then deleted before the next hourly backup will not be included in the long term. Put another way: You’re well covered.

We have a development server here, which holds all the revisions for the software we write. That code is always backed up inside our version control software. That is however on our intranet and I also could not access it until I rebuilt my machine.

COMEDY OF RE-INSTALLATION

When came back, it was a comedy of re-installation. First, I had a new hard drive installed, and nice larger drive. Then, trying a full re-install, etc. etc. So what happend you ask ? I have everything backup of data & user files, but I did not have a current backup of applications ( which was intentional ). And I lost all of my security ( encryption , etc ) which was also intentional. I keep my encryption information elsewhere.

I had to try a few different things to get my machine back up and running, which I won’t go into. I did not have many ‘gotcha’ moments, more like a lot of ‘nope, try again’ moments. But in the end, my machine is back with all the data.

MORAL OF THE STORY

So the moral of this story is backup. And get a mac. Hard drives are hard drives, but a mac can make your life much easier. I use Time Machine for backup, which is the easiest to use incremental backup I have ever used. Sometimes it is too easy.

So I am sure everyone here backs up their computers religiously. Yeah , right. If you are not doing backups, which I think is most of you, you should start. If it is too hard, get a mac, and use time machine.

I didn’t mean for this post to seem like an advert for Apple computers. I have no connection with Apple, just and enthuestic user. Yes, I also use Windows and Linux computers, so don’t give me that Apple ‘fanboy’ crap.