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Here’s a quick recap of my MacBook saga last week for you all to use as an anecdote as to why you should backup your data daily.

Wednesday evening, Sept 06, I’m playing around on the MacBook and it freezes. Completely unresponsive. I think it’d had only crashed like that once before so it was odd, but no big deal so I hold the power button down to shut down. Press power button again and after a few minutes, I get nothing but a folder icon with an question mark. Huh?

Long story short, after a bunch of diagnostics running Drive Utility off of the OSX install disc, I determine the hard drive had crashed. Kaput.

Next morning, I call Apple support, and we run through a bunch of tests (memory, reset the PRAM, etc.) and same conclusion. I’d spent about 45 minutes on the phone with the lady and finally she said that I had to drop it off at a local repair centre to get the drive replaced and here was my case number.

I decide to go to MyMacDealer, a relative newcomer in Edmonton’s Apple market especially compared to WestWorld, but they’re nice and close by — just a 5 minute drive to Whyte.

A 20 minute drive through lunch-time rush hour traffic later, I explain the problem, told them of all the tests I’d run, gave them the case number, and handed the MacBook over. They said that depending on how long it would take to order the drive in from Apple, it would take only a few days. Slight chance for Friday, but likely Monday afternoon my machine would be ready.

As I was out of town for the weekend, Monday would be fine. Monday afternoon I call, to find out the status of the machine, and they hadn’t even tested it yet. “Tested the machine? It’s a bad hard drive!” “Yes, but our techs need to check first.”

Tuesday rolls around, and the Tech finally started to look at it, to run some diagnostics.

Wednesday, the drive was ordered.

Friday, the drive arrived, and Friday afternoon it was installed and the trophy wife picked up the machine for me. I was lucky it wasn’t Monday as they rushed the drive in.

It’s frustrating. If you know it’s going to take a week-and-a-half, don’t bullshit me and tell me it’ll be done in 2 days. After the 3rd phone call I was about *this* close to grabbing the MacBook and going to WestWorld after talking to their techs, but resisted. The people at MyMacDealer were friendly enough, but I don’t appreciate false repair estimates. Whether WestWorld would be any different will remain to be seen in the future.

ANYHOW, I have an Ubuntu server with a 300gb drive in it that acts as my backup server. Before The Big Trip, I was fairly diligent in doing network backups on both laptops via the great SuperDuper! software. Upon return however, I never did said complete system backup due to sheer laziness of clicking a few buttons.

Luckily we had our trip photos on the iBook, and even mailed backup cd’s of our photos home from Prague, but I did manage to lose photos from a friend’s wedding, and some other things. I was able to do a data recovery on some of the camera memory cards using the wonderful EXIF Untrasher, but it doesn’t recover RAW images so some of the original shots are gone for good. There are backups on this site under the photo gallery, but they’re compressed and not of the greatest JPEG quality.

E-mails are all backed up in GMail, so those were fine.

The photos aren’t the problem though. It’s all of the system tweaks, scrips I write, and software I install on an almost daily basis. It was going to be a pain in the ass to get that set up again. Even my Ubuntu Parallels VM had to be recreated from scratch. Fun.

After the crash, I went out and bought a 320 GB external backup drive for a paltry $120. After partitioning the drive, I copied over the 50 GB .sparseimage MacBook backup from June to a new bootable partition. Pop in the OSX CD, go to drive utilities, click on restore, and nothing.

Turns out there’s a bug in the Intel OSX GUI that Apple just won’t fix with the resotre function in Drive Utilities. Bastards. So, I cracked open Terminal, typed the “asr” command and restored via the command line as per some instructions I Googled.

1 hour later, my machine was back up and running perfectly, albeit with software and settings dating back to June 2. However, no need to set up e-mail accounts, reimport old photos, documents, WPA wireless keys, bookmarks, etc., etc.

I now backup both laptops to the external drive every night. Takes 5 minutes. Much less effort than the hours I’m going to have to put in to get the MacBook back to where I want it.

No more excuses. The most frustrating aspect is that being in IT I should have known better, but at least now I’m going to pester everyone I know in to backing up their stuff as well.

For the amount of money I spent on the external drive compared to the time spent on data recovery, it factors down a couple bucks an hour. Your time is worth more than that, right?