When I got home, on a Saturday night…well, I did not see “the Englishman who could last till three” running out my back door, but I did sit down at my laptop.  Then I heard it.  The slight clicking, like tapping your fingernail on the window.  You guessed it.  My hard drive was toast.  Sure, I could have tried to fix it and maybe (but not likely) squeeze out another day or two, but the sign was ominous, even if the sound wasn’t:  My hard drive was toast. Gone. Dead.  I had exactly until the OS tried to page something in or out of memory time to continue what I was doing, then my computer would die.  So what to do?  It’s not like I could save any files!  And the more I did, the more likely the thing would page out.  Say goodnight, go to sleep. Deal with it tomorrow.

So my hard drive was dead.  Sixty Gigabytes of data gone in the span of a few short “clicks”.  Catastrophe?  Not at all.  I had started backing up with Time Machine a few weeks ago, and just last week I attached my backup drive to the network (using Airdisk on an AEBS).  I knew I had a full backup, and more importantly a recent full backup.  How recent?  I didn’t know yet.  But I slept well.  

Fast forward to Sunday.  My options were to take the whole kit to the Mac store or to get a new drive and go to town.  I dismissed the former option: first, I was out of warranty.  Second, there’s a tiny hairline crack …

which Apple would almost certainly claim voids my warranty.  Third, it would take 3 days to get the thing back.  A ring to Micro Center verified that they had compatible drives in stock.  At a 45 minute drive, it’s a bit of a fetch for us city-dwellers, but my friend Sage lives nearby and I heard they had a beer tasting scheduled for the evening.  Now that’s what I call a win-win situation.  So…I get a hard drive ($70), taste a couple of Belgian ales, play some Wii, and head home.  Replaced the drive, booted from CD. 

Time: about 1830 EDT.

Under the Utilities menu, there’s a very hopeful-sounding option: “restore from backup”. I select that, go through a few screens, and I end up with this screen.  Well, almost this screen.  The “Destination” area was empty.  It took about a half hour to calculate the size, and when it was done, the Destinations area was _still_ empty.  *grumble*  Go back. Open Disk Utility.  Format the drive.  Wait another half hour.  In the meantime, I took the old drive apart. then I got that screen.  A few more clicks and the restore process has started.

 

Time: about 1930 EDT.  It now tells me it will take about 23 hours to restore.  Actually around this time the longest it said was about 25 hours! Yipes.  Shower, Shave, Eat.  Move the computer closer to the wireless router.  Time estimate by about 10pm was down to 5-6 hours.   A little more respectable.  Time to go grab a beer.  Ride down to the local, get back around 0130 EDT Monday.  Lo and Behold: It’s done!

All in all, not a very painful process at all.   

Summary

The good

The process was simple, effective, and efficient.  The latest backup I had was from 1205 EDT Sunday—only an hour or two before the crash.  That means I lost practically no data.  Also, Time Machine backups up the entire drive…which means it’s pretty much restore-and-go. If I had to do it myself I’d have backed up only my home directory, which means I would have had to reinstall the OS, all the updates, all software, all software updates, and then restore my home directory.   I was able to replace the hard drive, restore in a few hours, and be back up and running without skipping a beat the next day. Who can argue with that?  Kudos to Apple and Time Machine for making the backup process practically invisible to the user, and the restore process intuitive.  Most importantly, my billable-hours log didn’t miss a thing!

The bad

I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth here, but…why didn’t the “restore from backup” option recognize a new, unformatted drive?  Sure I”m a geek, and I know how to Disk Utility and check the drive, format it, etc.  But this is the only sticking point where the “intuitive” nature of the backup fails.  Of course, one would assume that if you’re opening up the machine to replace the hard drive, you would also have the expertise to format before you do anything else.  Still and all…

The ugly

And now I’m nitpicking.  A few things were weird after the restore.  Sure, no data was lost.  But Caches and temporary files were, of course, not backed up.  Why backup the cache? Right?  

Well, let’s start with the first image post-restore: my desktop background.  Gone.  I keep my media files on a network drive.  The desktop background was selected through my photo library.  My iPhoto cache or whatever was gone so iPhoto did not know where I kept my library now.   Next, all my RSS feeds’ Read/Unread counts were wrong.  Similarly, all my web browser cache was gone, but the history was not.

Perhaps more annoying is that my Spotlight index was gone so I had to wait for the system re-index everything from scratch.  Also gone, strangely,  seemed to be the time machine index.  Although I could see my old backups, the next scheduled backup was a full, not differential.  Although both of these tasks are minor nuisances and were done in the background, they still affect system performance and could easily have been avoided by…oh yea…

So why back up the cache?  A better question would be, why not?  Sure you can recreate it, re-download stuff, etc. But you can re-install applications and the OS, so why back u the OS and applications?  You can quite easily backup the cache without taking up any extra space: just don’t archive it.  Every time you back it up, overwrite or erase any old files.

Also annoying was that Micro Center carried a variety of drive sizes (120GB - 250GB I believe) but all the same 5400 speed.  I would have liked to upgrade to 7200 or better while I was at it.

Speaking of ugly,

How are your backups doing lately?  How would you fare if your hard disk went bad today?  My computer, just barely over a year old, gave me no indication that the hard drive was failing.  Not more than two weeks earlier I had checked the SMART status and all was fine as frog hair.  If you have a mac, get yourself a backup drive: my WD 500GB drive was about $120 at Best Buy.  Time Machine comes free with 10.5.  So what’s keeping you?  If you’re on a PC, I’m sure good backup solutions exist for that market as well.  

Well, that’s all I got.  Check out almost-all the pictures, including the old drive taken apart, from the adventure and leave any questions or comments!

As always, happy to be your guinea pig,

mickey

Tags: backup, deconstruction, hard drive, restore, time machine

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Must Have, Techy Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.