Sat - June 3, 2006

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.

Posted at 03:23 PM      

Sun - February 5, 2006

Bad day in computerville


Grace's eMac woke up today showing only the cursor arrow alone on a black screen.

After diagnosing that it was probably software causing it, I looked at my Firewire options to reload system software. The 160 gigabyte external drive I have should have been useful for this, but it started moving really slow. After a restart, it didn't load at all. Disk Utility couldn't fix it. So, then I decided to use a 10.4 Tiger system disc to reload the software. But the eMac didn't want to read the DVD. The iMac reads it. But not the sick eMac.

I leave Disc Utility running using an old reliable Maxtor Firewire drive on the eMac as we leave the house for various shopping errands. After dropping everyone else off at the Eaton Centre, I go off to get my hair cut at the Chinese hair salon I usually go to. The iPod is good for this, as I can't understand a word of the conversations in the shop normally. But of course, as I try to select Podcasts to listen to Keith and the Girl, the scroll-wheel doesn't scroll. It's some kind of strange stuck, and doesn't want to play anything.

So far, that's all that's gone wrong today. 

Doing the hold-down-menu-and-the-select-buttons trick rebooted the iPod, and it was happy again. I've started getting things in line to work on the eMac's hard drive, and think it will probably go okay [fingers crossed]. The broken Firewire drive scares me a bit more. It's in the cheapest case that Factory Direct Computer had at the time, and has a buggy Prolific chip that controls everything. I have another problem drive that uses a previous version of that chip. The drive holds a large assortment of backed up files, and most of the movie files that I had downloaded -- mostly music videos that probably aren't available anymore. I'm worried at this point that these files are lost. My plan is to update the firmware on the drive controller (at work because it needs Windows for that) and hopefully it will work. If not, I'll get a new case and transfer the drive.

Posted at 11:59 PM      

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