by Gaz
The Importance of Backing Up Your Data: a cautionary tale
5:17 pm in Technology by Gaz
Or: Trying to get your files back after you lost them is expensive and stressful!
Last year, partly out of love for for new Apple hardware, and partly because I needed easy access to Linux to teach some courses on Linux Security and then Apache Security, I became the proud owner of a tempremental Rev A MacBook running Parallels, and handed down my trusty G4 iBook to Octavia.
During the hand off, I backed up all the data on Tave’s old iMac, and more recently, before we left Blighty last month, I congratulated myself on having backed up everything from my macBook to an external drive I entrusted to my beleaguered parents.
A couple of weeks ago, the iBook shut down for no apparent reason. After starting it up again, it ran for half an hour or so before shutting down… and the time between reboots rapidly shortened to the point where it barely had time to play the startup gong before dying for good. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, Octavia bought a refurbished iBook with 18 months of Apple Care left on it, and on Monday our local Apple Store tried to help us transfer Tave’s data from the hard drive in the dead machine with partial success; they were able to rescue the files from her home directory, but none of the other important stuff that she had left scattered around the rest of the machine. By Wednesday, we had both machines back, but plenty of the data Tave needed was still AWOL, so I decided to bite the bullet and buy some electronics tools and a 2.5″ drive cradle to search for the missing files myself.
I wonder whether Apple should not give admin rights to the first user it creates during install? It would certainly force people without a UNIX background to get to grips with the idea of multiuser operating systems, and home directories. As it stands, people who come from OS9 (or even Windows for that matter) aren’t phased by moving files from their cluttered desktop right into the root directory…
Anyway, the picture above was taken at 3am on Thursday after a successful data recovery, but with the transferred pro-applications (Adobe, I’m looking at you!) complaining about missing licenses and asking to be reinstalled from the cds in storage over 5000 miles away. On the right you can see the new iBook attached to the cradle bottom centre. Most of the rest of the picture is assorted debris from the disassembled dead machine… dismembered parts soon to arrive as spares on ebay. I got to bed a little after 6am, with everything bar CS2 in full working order.
Even though I have a one month old full backup of the whole macBook in England; a one day old backup of my home directory on a portable disk; all my music and audiobooks “backed-up” on my iPod; and an encrypted copy of my ssh keys and license codes on a usb key, it occurred to me that a sudden failure of my machine would involve another unproductive and stressful week of rebuilding everything. Rather than wait for that to happen, I’ve just bought a large enough external drive to keep an up to date clone of the entire contents of my macBook. If the worst happens, at least I’ll have a bootable copy of my setup to set a replacement machine up quickly.
Next dilemma: Do I tell Tave that she’s going to have to recreate all of her layered pictures and graphic design layouts with GIMP and Inkscape? Or do I call my beleaguered parents and have them go through all of our stored things and hunt for the installation CD’s, and then wait 2 or 3 weeks with crossed fingers for them to arrive safely via airmail? Or do I buy pirated copies from ebay to tide her over until we are next in the UK?
Sounds like a complete nightmare. And to make it worse, its not simply a case of doing something like rm -rf, its a hardware failure! :(
With regards to Gimp and Inkscape, they aren’t that bad. Unless you are trying to use them on a Mac with X11. (although i did have some luck compiling the “GTK quartz backend to take X11 out of the equation)
Which reminds me, i haven’t backed my Macbook up this week. Yikes!
Double nightmare in fact. Considering all the debris I created getting at the hard drive in the dead iBook, I didn’t dare to take the working one apart too… especially as that would have invalidated the warranty.
Thanks to the fabulous exchange rate, I got a 2.5″ drive cradle, a set of electronic screwdrivers, allan keys, torx bits, tweezers, spring loaded pliers and all the other mess of tools in the picture for less than £20!! Unfortunately 2 days of lost time at work didn’t come so cheap :-(
I didn’t know GTK had a quartz backend now… hmm, I’ll definitely spend some cycles on that. Although I’ve found when you set the X server to focus-follows-mouse, GIMP is very usable. It’s teaching Octavia to use it instead of Photoshop that I don’t like the idea of…
With respect to the CS2 apps, I buckled and resorted to bit torrent. I’ll put the real copies back in September when we pass through Blighty en route to Manila. I suppose I should do 500 Hail Mary’s to atone for my evil doings… ;-)