Mid-Life Crisis? Backup Disaster!
Well I wouldn’t call myself at mid-life yet, but I definitely had a crisis. This house has got a few different storage devices at the moment, including a Western Digital MyBook 1TB (it sucks, which I may explain in a future post!), a new Apple Time Capsule, 1TB, as well as a couple of other hard disks floating around.
I decided to reinstall my MacBook Pro the other day because it wouldn’t install the 10.5.3 update properly, and I had also recently installed some software which didn’t remove itself properly and tainted the system. I thought it would be a good opportunity to clean out the cobwebs. I carefully backed up my data however, due to a bug with the Western Digital MyBook which causes it to stop with a “permission denied” error and requires you to reboot it, I was having trouble backing up. The bug is so annoying that you have to carefully check what has been copied and what has not, because the only method for copying you’ve got is Samba.
Anyway the fact of the matter is, I backed up my photos carefully. The Time Capsule wasn’t in use yet, as it was new, and I decided to start doing regular Time Capsule backups AFTER the fresh Leopard install. Anyway, it was over a week ago when I performed this backup and with all the issues and what with having a new Time Capsule and all the issues with the MyBook I couldn’t remember which device I’d ended up backing up to. I was confident it was the Time Capsule because of the broken MyBook but alas, when I went looking for them tonight I couldn’t find them anywhere! After looking everywhere around on my MyBook and the Time Capsule, my heart sank. I couldn’t find my damn photos anywhere and I realised that I may have just lost 10Gb of photos and many, many months worth of snaps. I was so upset when suddenly I remembered my iPod! I had backed them up to my iPod! Oh wow, I was so relieved.
Lesson #1 – BE CAREFUL when you’re doing this kind of thing!
Lesson #2 – Get an Apple Time Capsule or an external hard drive and start using Time Capsule NOW. If you don’t you’ll regret it. We so often forget to back up and disk is cheap. When it comes to things like your photos, the couple of hundred pounds spent on backup disks is worth every penny. Nobody wants to lose their memories!
hear hear