Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Quiet For a While

I was going to post on Friday that there would be no posts for the long weekend. I'll be away at the beach as usual over July 4th and won't be back till Wed night. But now I can say even sooner there will be fewer posts. My mac's hard disk died a sudden death. Yep it happens to macs too. I have what should be a complete backup on an external drive from about a month ago. Not so bad as I don't really have anything critical. Since all my mail is kept on gmail that's ok, that system works out nicely.

I'll say it, but you won't really listen to me. Make sure you have backups and keep them current. Apparently this concept only sinks in after you've had a disaster yourself. Maybe Time Machine in Leopard will fix that.

I have two things to add. When my machine just hung today it was about 4pm. I tried a few things to bring it back and called a friend. Didn't make much progress. I tried making an appointment at the local Apple Store Genius Bar but it was booked. I managed to boot off of the Tiger DVD. I called Apple support and while I don't have Apple Care they took my call with only a couple of minutes wait and for free walked me through checking with Disk Utility and seeing the hard disk wasn't listed. That meant it needed someone to look at it so he made at appointment for me at the Genius Bar at 5:15pm. I don't know if he had special rights or an opening occurred but I got in the car and went over. The genius looked and yep it was dead. I ended up ordering the replacement drive through them, it was expensive but convenient and they had it in stock. They'll install it and try getting any data off of the old drive but that seems doubtful. By 6pm I was home. In just two hours I had called in support, dropped it off and had a plan to have it back to me. That's all without Apple Care on a 2+ year old machine. I think that's very nice. Apple is really making good use of their stores.

The second thing is that not having the PowerBook is kinda traumatic. I've been using it all the time as you can probably tell. But it's not quite as bad as when my series 1 TiVo died five years ago. On that one I had to send it to Sony to be repaired but lucked out to find it needed to go to Needham, MA which is about 20 mins from here. I dropped it off and even convinced them to fix it while I waited. I had it back up and running by the time I was back from work that day. Still the idea of TiVo dying was bad. I think it's probably less for the mac since I have a reasonable backup and I was planning on not bringing it with me on my trip anyway.

A last thing, I'm writing this post using bloggers web interface in Firefox on my PC. It's the first time the PC has been on in a few months. It's really not nearly as nice as using MarsEdit on the mac. But if I didn't have another computer and was completely cut off (and not by my own choice) I'd be pretty bummed.

3 comments:

grahams said...

You're lucky it died before Friday, because as soon as the iPhone is released the Apple Stores are going to be a no-fly zone for weeks.. =)

I had the same thing happen a few weeks ago... Fortunately, I am pretty diligent about backups and only lost less than 2 weeks of data.. I've recently started to play with using Brackup to do nightly backups to Amazon's S3 storage service.. So far I am backing up my docs and email nightly, but I think I'm eventually going to do a fully backup...

Howard said...

I've been using SilverKeeper to an external drive. I think the most annoying thing will be a months worth of quicken data to reenter. The one question I have is about restoring the keychain, is it just a file to copy over or is it encrypted in some machine specific key? Also, if I get my machine back and it's a clean installed OS, should I just use SilverKeeper to mirror the ext drive onto the new internal drive, copy the whole $HOME or somehow use the Apple copy-data-from-another-machine thing it does when booting a new system for the first time? Hmmnmm.

Anonymous said...

Sorry to hear about your HDD troubles Howard, but HDDs aren't engineered to last. 300GB 3 1/2" for $50, & 500GB for $100 now though.

I wonder if many consumers even noticed changes in HDD warrantees (3yr to 1yr, then back to 3yrs) recently.

I continually stunned by how much faith people have in aged low priced HDDs: for example during my last visit back East I found out my parents had all their digital photos & taxes on a single HDD in a computer they had bought at a yard sale 4 years back. I drove to Best Buy, bought a 100GB USB for $50 and had everything backed up that evening.

- Starch