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Post your comments for MacBook Woe: A tale of a near Mac disaster, averted by good backups here

[pcharles]

Oh! Man! Does this sound like a familiar story!

About three weeks ago I was doing some tiding in my office and started up my Black 2008 Macbook, then started Word with an armful of books. Part way through the Word loading process (takes a while) I dropped a textbook that I was carrying and it caught the corner of my Macbook causing the spinning beach ball of doom! I knew I was in trouble, but rebooted anyway and just got the folder of doom, and knew I'd killed the drive!

Fortunately, I have always been pretty religious about my backups, actually you might say obsessive, after a friend of mine lost a huge chunk of his PhD thesis when his baby climbed across the keyboard! This was back around 1992 and I have been obsessed with backup ever since.

My Macbook is backed up wirelessly by Time Machine to a 2TB drive on my Extreme when I am at home, and using Synchronize Plus (QDEA software) to my office iMac. I then use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up the whole drive to an external Seagate portable drive. Unfortunately, right now SuperDuper does not seem to fully support Lion and the Recovery drive, so I am using CCC until SuperDuper gets an update. The iMac is then backed up via Time Machine to a 2TB LaCie in my office and to the university server using Synchronize Plus. At home, I back up my iMac by Time Machine to the 2TB drive on my Extreme and then use BackBlaze (AWESOME BTW), to make an offsite backup. Periodically, I also make a full clone of the internal that is kept at work.

So, after trying a number of disk tools I knew I needed a new drive. After reading about them, I decided to upgrade the HHD to a Crucial M4 SSD because it was about $50 cheaper than the OWC drive, and I could get it overnight for $3.99 with my Amazon Prime. Got it installed in a Jiffy and installed Lion from my clone. When I booted it for the first time I was shocked. This four year old 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo booted to ready in under 30 seconds. That was faster than my i7 iMac. Even more amazing was the performance boost it gave to Office and Parallels. It was like having a brand new computer. I was so excited.

About a week later, right after the Apple Keynote, I was out somewhere and put a "sealed" water bottle in my book bag with the Macbook, and. . . well. . . . you can see where this is going! It leaked, a lot, and soaked the Macbook. I seriously wondered if someone was telling me "Get a new 13inch i7." Amazingly, after a week in rice, it is actually alive. Its not 100% because there are a few "water" spots behind the screen and the Magsafe cable occasionally needs to be flicked up and down to get the charging light to turn on, but thanks to my backups and an amazingly resilient Macbook, I am still functioning!

Long story, I know, but . . . . . .

This post has been edited by pcharles: 02 July 2012 - 05:24 AM

[BrianRothschild]

There is an old but time tested and true saying. "Downtime can be scheduled or unscheduled ... Take your pick! Meaning take the time to back up and update on a consistent basis or 13F wont be the last time you have to repair.

Good work. Good article.

Brian R.
macfixer1@gmail.com

[lordPatton]

I too have a hole in my backup system, in that--while I always have an on-site and off-site backup, they are not always up to date. The onsite backup may be 1-10 days out of sync, and the off-site backup maybe a month or two. It's enough to prevent *catastrophe", but not headaches and (some) data loss.
Using DropBox is a great idea, but I'd rather not manually manage my recent files on DropBox. I'd love and app (or perhaps clever workflow) that could automatically backup everything I've worked on in the last, say, two weeks.

[QCassidy352]

Good article. More of an issue for folks with notebooks I guess. I have an imac, and the only way I'd lose everything is if something destroyed my whole apartment. Which could happen, but I guess that's a risk I'm willing to take. Unless that happens, I figure I'm covered with a time capsule in a different room and an external HD tucked away in a drawer.

[billthecat]

Receptionist: "How do you write women so well?"
Wendell: "I think of a man, and take away reason and accountability."

Best line ever. And this anecdote really underscores it.

[DominikHoffmann]

My own observations:

1. CrashPlan Central is a great service, and I recommend it to everyone, as a comprehensive cloud backup solution. For those for whom CrashPlan Central is too expensive, the CrashPlan software provides for buddy-to-buddy backup to a friend's computer also running CrashPlan.

2. Even without strangers spilling water on your computer, hard drives go bad. I have had a number of those that are in use 24/7 go bad before their manufacturer's 3-year warranties were up. Both Seagate and Western Digital recently shortened their standard warranty periods to one and two years, depending on the specific product. I don't know this for a fact, but it seems like the reliability of hard drives has gone down, as their data density has increased. Lesson: Replace your hard drives before they go bad (after two years of use, perhaps). I tend to run out of storage before this happens anyway, and larger hard drives typically have come down in price enough for this to be not too painful.

3. SSDs look nice, but are, of course still very expensive. Also, because of their limited write cycles and the fact that entire blocks always get written at once, I understand that they are not necessarily a complete drop-in replacement for spinning-disk drives, at least in the long run. There is a maintenance algorithm that addresses this called TRIM. Mountain Lion uses TRIM--but only on factory-installed SSDs. There is one utility I know of, which all Mac users who install their own SSDs should learn about, TRIM Enabler, which you can find on MacUpdate.

[DominikHoffmann]

One more thing, a plug for a slight improvement to Time Machine.

Daily I shuttle my MacBook Pro between work and home. Therefore, I do Time Machine backups both at home and at work. At home I have a 6 GB RAID array hooked up to an Xserve via eSATA made available as a network-attached backup medium for Time Machine. At work it is a simple Time Capsule.

Unfortunately, I have to twice daily go into Preferences and switch the backup destination. It would seem like a simple thing for the Time Machine preference pane to simply discover which backup destination is available at which location and make the switch automatically. I had hoped for this to appear in Lion, but am now holding out for Mountain Lion on that score.

[MmnW]

Nice article. Brings back memories.
About two years ago, I was giving an iPhoto presentation, when one of the attendees spilled a glass of champagne on my macbook pro. It died instantly, but stupid as I was, I tried to restart and had the same experience as you did. Sadly enough, the main board was totally fried in my case (actually, the insurance inspector, the unlucky guest had good insurance, later determined the champagne had, propelled by it's bubbles, instantly corroded all the circuits).
I went with my time machine backup, luckily it wasn't as much out of date as yours. I also had a super duper clone, but found it nearly useless at that point. My replacement Mac came with an OS preinstalled and copied everything else from the time machine backup. Since then, I stopped creating clones, the hassle is just too big. They take forever to create and are only useful in very distinct circumstances (i.e. you can just swap in the cloned drive and don't want to upgrade).
Today I go with a three tier strategy. I use DropBox for all my current work. I keep all folders I work on in the Dropbox Folder and move them to an Archive folder in my home directory when the project is over. This secures all short term losses, but may be not the right thing for someone working with large files (movies, pictures). I use Time Machine with the default setup. And lastly, I copy the most recent Time Machine backup every other week to a different hard drive, which I keep at a safe deposit box at an undisclosed location for long term security.

[grackle]

1. To be honest the worst thing that happened here was to learn that someone is drinking the water from an airplane bathroom.

2. SugarSync is a much better option than DropBox, in my opinion, with the exception of DB ability to sync 1 Password. SugarSync lets you sync your files and folders without having to move them into a proprietary überfolder.

3. Carry your backup HDs with super duper on them wherever you go. (I do and it saved me several times).

[grackle]

 grackle, on 02 July 2012 - 08:01 AM, said:

1. To be honest the worst thing that happened here was to learn that someone is drinking the water from an airplane bathroom.

2. SugarSync is a much better option than DropBox, in my opinion, with the exception of DB ability to sync 1 Password. SugarSync lets you sync your files and folders without having to move them into a proprietary überfolder.

3. Carry your backup HDs with super duper on them wherever you go. (I do and it saved me several times).

A correction, since first post wouldn't let be use U with an umlaut.

[wardoggie]

Lex, glad you were able to get back up and running. Your cautionary tale is a good reminder for us all, but it made me wonder about two things.

1. How/why did DiskWarrior change its mind about your drive? (BTW, DiskWarrior has saved me a lot of grief in earlier versions of OS X. I highly recommend it, too.)

2. I have a MBP with an SD card slot. I've been thinking that a 16GB SD card might make a good backup drive for key files. Good idea or not?

[TeaEarleGreyHot]

Glad you were able to recover from this.

Quote

I live-tweeted some of 13F’s shenanigans—when she spilled mayonnaise on her iPad, when she bumped her head on her tray table

Hmmm.... tweeting ridicule about a fellow passenger? Karma's a beach, ain't it.

[linkman]

This reminds me of how dangerous this chemical can be: http://www.dhmo.org and http://en.wikipedia....n_monoxide_hoax