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Published On: Jun 03, 2006 04:02 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jun 03, 2006 04:02 PM
Backups? Sort of doesn't cut it.
I have mostly recovered from the last major
computer problem. Back in March, the iMac started locking up for no apparent
reason. Okay, turn back the clock a little more. Back in December, I decided to
upgrade the hard drive in my iMac. The 80 gig drive was just about full, and I'd
moved everything I could to the firewire drives. So, I found a deal for a 200
gig Seagate Serial-ATA (SATA) drive on tigerdirect.ca. 5-year warranty. Solid
brand name, and the original Apple drive was also a Seagate, so I thought I'd
have the best luck staying with the same brand. What could go
wrong?
The install went pretty well. I had to pick up a
#10 Torx bit from Canadian Tire to get everything apart and back
again. After the install, things transferred back on using Carbon
Copy Cloner and Disk Utility, and in the process, I had an image from
the previous drive stored on one of my external Firewire drives. All was happy
and zoomy with the increase in disc space. iPhoto and iTunes were happy programs
again.
Turn the clock forward again to March. Random freezes. Just like the Windows guy in the Apple ad. But technically, this wasn't Apple's fault. The diagnosis pointed to the three-month-old hard drive. I put back in the original drive, and everything worked fine. So, I put in a new bigger hard drive. This time from Maxtor. Happy iMac again.
But the little problem was almost everything that I did in the last three months was stuck on the misbehaving hard drive. E-mails, music, church newsletters, and of course, photos. Luckily, I had recently done a DVD-ROM archive on my iPhoto library that covered up to most of February. And when the problems started I attempted to copy the March photos to one of my external. So, I thought I had most everything.
Recently, I've figured out that I'm missing all of the Photos from February 26 to March 9. They include a shot destined for the cover of a future issue of The Gathering newsletter. Also photos of the bands Dirty on Purpose and The Great Lake Swimmers and a CBC Radio 3 show at the Drake. Other shots lost were from the Little India section of Gerrard Street. A couple of hundred photos in total.
I could get by with the rest of the files, but losing the photos really sucks. So, I checked into getting a company to rescue the information off of the broken drive. Apparently, it would cost from $400 to several thousand dollars. Ouch.
The other thing that was broken was this blog. We use iBlog to publish it out to our .Mac account. The local copy of this was on the iMac, and that meant, that all of the entries from Christmas through March were only still out on the internet. So, all the entries had to be copied back into the software, or the next time we published, they'd disappear. (Luckily, we don't blog that much.) You're reading now with everything up to date, finally.
So the moral of the story is back things up. Since then, I've started using Backup to keep an extra copy of the iPhoto photographs and the work I do on the newsletter. Planned is a network backup system all of the Macs in the house. Most likely, I'll use a network attached storage drive from Iomega. It's a pain in the wallet, and a pain in the rear to set something like that up. But, I've learned my lesson. If it's not backed up, consider it lost.
Turn the clock forward again to March. Random freezes. Just like the Windows guy in the Apple ad. But technically, this wasn't Apple's fault. The diagnosis pointed to the three-month-old hard drive. I put back in the original drive, and everything worked fine. So, I put in a new bigger hard drive. This time from Maxtor. Happy iMac again.
But the little problem was almost everything that I did in the last three months was stuck on the misbehaving hard drive. E-mails, music, church newsletters, and of course, photos. Luckily, I had recently done a DVD-ROM archive on my iPhoto library that covered up to most of February. And when the problems started I attempted to copy the March photos to one of my external. So, I thought I had most everything.
Recently, I've figured out that I'm missing all of the Photos from February 26 to March 9. They include a shot destined for the cover of a future issue of The Gathering newsletter. Also photos of the bands Dirty on Purpose and The Great Lake Swimmers and a CBC Radio 3 show at the Drake. Other shots lost were from the Little India section of Gerrard Street. A couple of hundred photos in total.
I could get by with the rest of the files, but losing the photos really sucks. So, I checked into getting a company to rescue the information off of the broken drive. Apparently, it would cost from $400 to several thousand dollars. Ouch.
The other thing that was broken was this blog. We use iBlog to publish it out to our .Mac account. The local copy of this was on the iMac, and that meant, that all of the entries from Christmas through March were only still out on the internet. So, all the entries had to be copied back into the software, or the next time we published, they'd disappear. (Luckily, we don't blog that much.) You're reading now with everything up to date, finally.
So the moral of the story is back things up. Since then, I've started using Backup to keep an extra copy of the iPhoto photographs and the work I do on the newsletter. Planned is a network backup system all of the Macs in the house. Most likely, I'll use a network attached storage drive from Iomega. It's a pain in the wallet, and a pain in the rear to set something like that up. But, I've learned my lesson. If it's not backed up, consider it lost.
Posted: Sat - June 3, 2006 at 03:23 PM