iphoto backup rigamarole, RESOLVED!

Well, that is a huge relief. For those who have missed it, I had a hard drive crash a little while ago. The Time Machine recovery was pooched because it had corrupted some iPhoto files, which happened because iPhoto was open when the backup happened. Sigh.

Apple is usually pretty good about this sort of stuff. It is completely reasonable to assume that any random piece of software could be open, with any number of files open, when the backup happens. It isn't rocket science to realize that if the backup software can't cope with open files, they ought to warn the user that documents created by x software have not been backed up in some number of days, and please to close that piece of software and run the backup again.

So I've been struggling with the file that Time Machine created, and it is well and truly pooched. I had known there were many photos on the iPad, but assumed it was the last 1000 created by Photostream. Then I realized it was all of them. Yes, my friends, ALL of them. Lucky me. Now I just needed a way to get them off the iPad and back onto the Mac.

Apple does not make this easy. In fact, it's impossible with Apple software. Oh sure, getting what's in the camera roll is trivial. It's all the rest of the items in various folders in the photo app. Yet, I just finished coping about 4400 of those photos back to my iMac for backup.

The secret for me was an  iMac app called Wondershare MobileGo for iOS. It's $40, which is steep for an app, but it works out to less than a cent per photo. Cheap at twice the price. I've put them in folders to be opened with Preview, and dropped a copy back into iPhoto. It just finished churning away doing it's thing. The good thing is that it looks like they are back at the resolution they were, in spite of the warnings that they would be smaller because they couldn't convert back from the iPad optimized format.

The only downside is that it seems to be a bit arbitrary with file names, and wasn't good about keeping them in date order. I don't care. I suppose if I really wanted to, I could create a bunch of new folders and go through the whole library moving things and putting in tags so I can find things. At a minute a photo, that's about 100 hours. As if. The software does other stuff too, in moving things between the various Apple devices, better than Apple does itself.

Say it with me - the moral of the story is to turn off iPhoto and back up your data. Tomorrow's task is to scrub the external drive, check it, partition it, and get both a Time Machine and SuperDuper backup running on their own partitions. That's after I cheer on a buddy at a race, while baby sitting a small child who seems to like me. The mom has promised to search to search me and the car for duct tape. Good thing she doesn't know I have a buddy who lives in Turner Valley...

So where was I before I was so rudely interrupted? Working on my novel. I just got back into that. Turns out I lost a little bit of work there, the last saves never made it. That's ok. Trying to get more regular about runs and swims. Still working on that. I realized as I was going through things that I had started a plank a day, and fell off that wagon some time ago.