Mac Back

I'm declaring my mac restored. I got a call from the Apple on Friday morning (the 29th, that was iPhone day) that my mac was ready and went in and picked it up before heading to NJ for a long weekend. I got back on the 4th. The new hard drive had OS X installed but none of my data. I have an external (LaCie d2 Extreme) hard drive that I mirror my machine's drive using the free Silverkeeper. I try to backup monthly but I've slipped some times. My last backup was June 12th which was fortunate because I think it was March before that.

I had once before booted from the drive but having only one machine I never had a good way to practice restoring. I reconfigured Silverkeeper to copy everything from the drive to the mac. After checking it sixteen times, I let it run and then booted off the mac. It came up, but I couldn't login. Ugh.

So I reinstalled OS X from the installation DVD. When booted for the first time the mac asks if you want to copy data from another machine. I plugged in the LaCie drive and said yes. It copied all my user data over, including that of the 2 additional accounts I have (mostly for testing). It also brought over apps in /Applications (that's not ~/Applications) including MS Office which just worked. I finished booting and ran Software Update and got up to 10.4.10.

I started my apps and all seemed to be right, though 3 weeks old. However I had a problem with iPhoto. It showed my library with the right number of pictured indicated and all my albums, books, etc. It also showed my ratings, keywords and comments, but it didn't show the images. The 6GB of images were in the library but they only showed as grey boxes. I searched the forums which told me about rebuilding the library by starting iPhoto by option clicking on it. I did that several times but no change. I called AppleCare that was so helpful for free when my drive failed, but now they wanted $50 to help. I wasn't quite up to that. I spent the time to write the detailed post on the apple support forums and waited for an answer. In the mean time I went through other things. Someone had sent me some .wmv files that wouldn't play. I assumed they were the latest MS codec that didn't work but I somehow figured out to run Software Update again which downloaded a Quicktime update among other things. Lo and behold, this fixed my iPhoto problems. It uses Quicktime to show the images and it was somehow corrupted and the update fixed it.

The only thing I lost was 2 weeks of data. My email goes through Gmail and while I could read it all online, only the messages since the drive failure were downloaded to Mail.app. There's no way to tell Gmail to mark a time period of messages (from my backup to the failure) to be downloaded via POP3. I went through my email and found the contact updates people sent and a few things to put on my calendar. This weekend I reentered the Quicken data for the period, not too bad. I just need my next bank statement for the details of 3 checks I wrote. I had started using iGTD pretty heavily for todo lists and lost a lot of that, but not too bad (I am still on sabbatical). I had made two donations in June, one of books and one of clothes and while I have the receipts, I had the details as pdf's on the mac. I've mostly recreated the book donation in Delicious Library, but it's hard to determine what books you no longer have. For the clothes I had a handwritten count so recreating the spreadsheet of value should be easy. I had subscribed to some new RSS feeds and I think I've recreated them. I had recently cleanup many Safari bookmarks, but apparently it was before June 12th.

From this experience I understand people's interest in moving to web apps. Gmail kept my data and if I had more online I would have been safer. Unless of course these other companies offering me free storage have a failure of their own. I like that I have a copy of my Gmail via POP3 on my local mac. But it would be nice to have more apps synced like this. iCal and GCalendar are an obvious thing to look into. I also see the value of having a second mac in the case of failure. Using a PC was a little painful and in the two days I spent a lot of time downloading software updates as it hasn't been on in a few months. At that point, .mac used to sync the two machines starts to look appealing. Leopard's Time Machine also looks really attractive. I'm planning on getting a new MacBook Pro when Leopard ships and now I'm thinking about added an AirPort Extreme base station with a drive connected to it. I'm just not sure how well Time Machine recovers from a drive failure vs just finding an old copy of a file you lost.