JB's Blog

Travelling back from Melbourne via Airplane I thought it would be a good opportunity to catch up on my ‘paper-work’ and update my timesheet’s.

The harddrive gods however had other plans.

As I was moving documents around my Macbook Pro the system gave me the ‘Spinning Wheel of Death’ and after much waiting I discovered in the console that I was receiving I/O errors.

Oh dear, so when I got home I thought I might try a disk repair to see if it was filesystem related instead of disk drive.

Disk drive failure! I didn’t have the AppleCare disk scanning tools to confirm it but was 99% sure. So I checked it in to a AppleCare repair shop near my house.

I wasn’t too concerned with my work, as majority of my work related files are on the cloud. I use Google Documents for office related documents, I use DropBox for everything else. E-mail is with Gmail, and my contacts/calendar are sync’d as well. A few other bits and pieces were on my iPhone.

Then thought to myself in horror that the all my personal photo’s/documents/movies are stored on one place, my Macbook Pro.

I do have a daily time machine backup run that backups up to an external USB disk drive.

Crazily, my life’s ‘stuff’ was now sitting on one signal disk drive and I just had to hope it had backed up things correctly.

Luckily it had, and the restore did work (quite easily with Time Machine). Now I’m going to look in investing in something like a Drobo to have at least some type of secondary redundancy in case the backup drive dies in the future.

Friends of mine will always hear me preach “Harddrive’s suck, backup your data”. Redundancy is not a backup either. You got to have multiple copies. It’s not a question of if, but when your harddrive will fail. Plan accordingly.

So now I have my precious irreplaceable data back, such as this shot from Wilko from a trip in 2004.

Or this shot with MasterCyl and our LanSmash bulk buy of Battlefield 1942 back in 2003.

Or this shot of Dan helping me assemble a Mini-ITX chassis from scratch with aluminium.

Or this shot of myself and my brother going to StarWars Episode 2 launch in the Brisbane cinema back in 2003.

you get the drift.