Macbook Pro Back in Action
Bringing the Macbook Pro back to life ended up being pretty easy. The hard disk in it seemed to be OK so I have no idea why it corrupted but I guess these things just happen.
Overall my backup strategy was reasonably successful although I did loose a few things.
1. My Photos from my vacation to New York for my wifes 40th birthday last weekend
2. The last 3 months of backups from my accounts package
3. The latest edition (not yet released) of my Late Night Cocoa podcast
So why weren’t these things backed up.
The photos because I had only just downloaded them from the camera (with the delete from camera option checked). The accounts because I had set it up wrong and the LNC episode, well I don’t know, every other episode is there I just can find this one anywhere. I guess I need to move to a disk cloning system like superduper to try and avoid this.
The whole process of bringing the machine back was pretty easy (although time consuming) , run the OS X install CD and let it install the OS and all the supplied applications a fresh. Run Software Update and let it bring everything up to date.
I took the opportunity while doing a complete rebuild to also repartition my drive to run BootCamp. I have no intention of running BootCamp directly but software like parallels and VMware Fusion run quicker off a bootcamp partition than using a virtual hard disk. So next I downloaded BootCamp and set about installing Windows on the new partition. (This took a lot longer than OS X).
Next I Installed both Parallels and the Beta Version of VMware Fusion onto OS X (I am trying to decide which I prefer) and set them up to use the BootCamp Partition.
So now with a functioning system it was time to restore data and any other application that needed that data. My back up strategy was fairly basic but seemed to catch most of it, but recovering all the data definitely took longer than it should so I will be revising and improving it.
My last what I would call full back up was a week earlier and kept on an external hard drive. This back up consisted of my User home folder and all its sub directories so in theory should have contained everything from a week before (hence the loss off the NY Photos) This also meant my email files were week old but as I set all my pop servers to keep mail for 14 days the mail application soon had the email up to date although I did have to go through hundreds of unread e-mails filtering out what I wanted and what I didn’t. I currently only perform this full backup manually when I remember (I am pretty good) but I think I need to learn a lesson and automate this so watch out for Backup Software reviews here.
Certain very active folders like my documents folder and my projects folder where I keep all my source code are backed up constantly using Mozy. This is the first time I have needed to restore anything from Mozy (I know I should have tested it before but I didn’t) so it was a bit nerve racking. This worked out incredibly well. You go to the website and log in, go to the restore option, select the files you want to restore and press go. Mozy then starts preparing a single dmg disk image file containing all the files you want to restore. This may take a while if you have selected lots of files so Mozy emails you when the job is complete. You then go back to the website and download the dmg file (I assume if you using windows it does a zip file rather than a dmg) which was 1.9GB in my case.
Next I needed to reinstall all the software I use. As most of the applications are electronic download I had to go around the web finding the software and re-downloading it.
Audio Hijack Pro
Fission
Skype
Adium
Shrook
OmniWeb
Camino
QuickSilver
iGTD
TextMate
MarsEdit
I think from now on I will keep copies of the install images on my machine. I know they may go out of date but as most applications auto update this will be a lot quicker.
My next issue was filtering through my email looking for license keys to all the software I had just installed. I definitely need to sort out a central place for license keys.
Finally I installed the few pieces of software I actually have on CD
MS Office 2004
OmniGraffe Pro
And I’m back.
Reasonably successful but lessons learnt. As I have no idea why my disk corrupted I guess I need to be on my toes in case its a recurring problem and get these issues sorted out quickly.