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decisions, decisions

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The Backup Fairy got cranky at me and backhanded me. I preach the gospel of backups, and I'm really good about backing up my computers in the office, but I'd been remiss in backing up my personal MacBook. So she decided that it was time to teach me a lesson, and killed the hard drive on my personal laptop.

My last full backup is about a year old. Oh, the data loss. My financial data is the one that hurts the most. I manage every single facet of my financial life in Quicken:Mac, and I've got more than 10 years worth of data in there now. So I've got a backup that has all of that old data, but the more recent data (which includes all of the financial stuff surrounding buying a home) is gone. The crash also happened the day after I'd submitted my tax return via TurboTax, so I don't have a copy of that anywhere else. And then there's the extensive list of tasks that I'd built in up Entourage to remind me when my cats are due for their shots and when I need to renew my passport, and oh goodness am I screwed. [1]

So now it's decision time. I'm going to have to invest a lot of time and effort into recreating my computing environment. I had been thinking that I wanted to switch from a laptop at home to a desktop, and had been eyeing an iMac for some time. I hadn't been thinking of buying a new iMac now, but maybe it's time to do so. If I'm going to have to do it anyway ... well, I could do it on a new hard drive for my MacBook, or I could do it on a whole new iMac. And then I could get rid of my existing MacBook, as well as the ancient lampshade iMac that I've got in my study right now. That's a net reduction of one computer in the household, which has got to be positive. And a new iMac would definitely be beefy enough to run Sims 3 when it comes out later this year, whereas I can't even run Sims 2 on my current MacBook.

Hmmm, I think I might have just talked myself into it. I guess it's time to do some research into the ease of upgrading certain iMac components (RAM, hard drive, video card) and their relative cost as well. No decision yet, but watch this space.

Oh, and let this serve as a reminder: go backup your computer(s) right this very instant. Trust me, you do not want to contemplate having to recreate it all, and how much of it is lost forever. Go backup. Now. Please. :)

[1] Before anyone asks, I've done pretty much everything that I could do to try to recover the data, short of paying lots of money for a data recovery service. When my MB wouldn't boot, I pulled the drive and connected it to a SATA -> USB bridge. Then I connected the SATA->USB bridge to another OS X machine. Disk Utility was unable to recognize the drive. OS X system log did not report any messages related to this drive. Utilities like Disk Warrior and Disk Warrior and Data Rescue don't see the drive. When I hooked it up to a Linux box, it sees the drive initially, but then can't read anything on it. I finally tried to swap the PCBs between my drive and an identical one, and that didn't get me anywhere. My guess is that the head is dead, which is immensely expensive to recover from.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2009
    TurboTax should have the tax return as a download and your bank should have the financial info for at least the last year in electronic form.

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2009
    So far (and I've only just started trying to reconstruct things), I've discovered that my various financial institutions have varying amounts of data readily available.  For example, my credit union (which has my savings and chequing) only has 180 days of data available online.   Thanks for the TurboTax tip -- I hadn't thought about that!

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2009
    See if you can get a Time Capsule too, I have one and it's amazing at keeping your data backed up - and the best of all, it's all automatic. It has saved me from a few headches!

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2009
    I did one last night, and all I've done with the computer since then was read this blog post. Is that good enough? I use this wonderful tool called "Windows Home Server" to handle my backups. Sadly, the automated backup utility doesn't work for Macs yet (I hope they're working on a Mac version of the software), but it handles backups very smoothly, in addition to being a fairly easy "NAS"-like solution.

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2009
    TimeCapsule and TimeMachine are your friends

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2009
    I use TimeMachine on my MBP at the office.  I don't use a TimeCapsule, but rather another external drive.  So that machine is all happily backed up. Since I have so many computers at home (there's my laptop, the boyfriend's laptop, the Mini which is our media server, and the ancient iMac in the study), we've instead bought a NAS for our storage needs (to replace the pile of external hard drives that are hooked up to the Mini).  We're getting it set up right now.  When it's all set up, the only thing that will be stored on the Mini is its applications and settings, and probably a few temporary files stored on the desktop.  And then all of the other computers will backup to the NAS, and we'll be set.  

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2009
    +1 for Time Machine / Time Capsule

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2009
    I have Time machine running on my MBPro, but of course multiple backups are also good, so I use Crashplan (http://www.crashplan.com/) to backup important files to my XP machine, and similarly backup important files on the XP machine to an external drive on my MBPro.

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2009
    new Mac Mini, new NAS, new gigabit Ethernet - yay!