The cannibal back up drive

This has been a very stressful week. I did not sweat the internal hard dive failure because I had a back up drive with Apples back up software running on it, even when it was annoying. I got my computer back last Wednesday evening, and I thought I was being clever in going back several days to avoid a back up made by a dying computer.

Imagine my surprise, shock, and horror after yoga when I discovered the recovery had failed. I went back a week, and woke up to a failed recovery. Then I found out the recovery attempts had eaten the OS on the internal drive, and I floundered around in the white screen of death till I got into the recovery disk. This is exceedingly clever of Apple. Holding down Command R while starting is your friend when things go bad.

After some poking around I discovered Time Machine had not made a back up in 12 days. I restored the OS, then went back 14 days. That took a long time, and failed. The phone calls to AppleCare started. This got bumped up to a senior advisor. Things get a bit hazy here.

I know a great deal of the data is there, possibly all of it. There is a file or something that is causing the restore to crash. The advisors strongly suspect that peeling back some of the corrupt backups, and trying a migration process would just take a lot of time and fail on the same file.

So we're doing it old school. Right now the computer is coping my user files, all 7721 and 104.35 GB of them. Needless to say this is going to take awhile. The latest advisor was pretty sure that if the prepare to copy could figure out how many files, and the size, the copy should go fine. Then we can look and see what else needs doing badly enough to manually do it.

The moral of the story is that your hard drive will fail. I've had 3 fail now. Something might happen to your back up copy. Check to see if it works. Learn how to test to see if a restore works. Some people keep crucial backups in the cloud, as they say now. That's where the latest text of my almost-novel is. I will be looking at some thing like carbon copy cloner, as an alternative way to make an additional backup. Big drives are cheap, I might even get a second one to keep off site somewhere.

Running is going well, even if I don't quite believe the one hour 14.3K run tonight. The one hour, light and happy feet, I believe, but it's more like 8 to 9 K. Several shorter runs during the week went quite well too.

And swims too! The water feel is coming back. My inner shark hasn't shown up though, so there is still lots of improvement needed.

Beakerhead was here in Calgary. Commander Hadfield is as awesome in person as in video. The rest of the gala opening was the most fun we've ever had at Jack Singer Hall. We wandered around the 3 sites for beakernight on Saturday, and had an excellent time. The weather was perfect. I am seriously impressed with Stickboy, the robotic drummer for Compressorhead.

So in short, I'm still reading blogs, but not commenting much on them, Facebook, or Twitter. Hopefully my computer will be back to its old self soon, and I can fully rejoin the social media world.


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