Had a mega scary and freaky day yesterday as my Mac decided to have a super meltdown. Basically I had to erase the disc and restore.
Fortunately I had a very recent back-up from the night before and only lost an hour of work on Magellan, instead of 16+ years of that and man, many other things.
Everything seems OK now, hopefully it stays that way. A seriously stressful day!
Always backup, folks!
The story so far…
[1] Wannabe
[#] History
[2] Great Leap Forward
[3] Daze
[4] Bad Karma
[#] Gifford: Hero [back soon]
[#] Buying the Stairway to Heaven
[5] Worst Fieldtrip Ever
[#] Redux: Gola Beh
[6] Lock(e)down
[#] The Things That Matter
[7] PaRARGdox
Tales from the MagellanVerse…
Olga & Brelvis
Dr Spooky & Otto
The Olaf Mystery
Legacy
Crossoverkill [a crossover!]
Magellan stuff
About
Cast
Contact [email]
Fan Art [back soon]
Fan Fiction
Magellan Miscellany[back soon]
Magellan TV Tropes Page
I’m here for the story-related stress… Don’t freak me out with tales of crashed hard drives! 🙃
*wondering if Jenna would REALLY say that🧐*
Thank you for the reminder to back-up, Grace.
Also very glad to hear that your losses were substantially minimized!
What kind of failure forces you to erase data from disk? With windows, ransomware may do it, but I don’t expect those to be problem with Macs …
I used to work for Apple’s support line and took calls for assistance with Macs. If something goes very wrong, wipe and restore is something that can be recommended. If the hard disk got corrupted, or you can’t get the Mac to boot, things like that. It’s been a while since I was there though,
So, is Macs really designed so badly data disks needs to be wiped to restore booting, or is that just the support line being used to people too stupid to do anything more complicated?
Well, in this instance, it was the only option available. But also, yes, the first thing.
There is ransomware targeting Macs and Linux as well, just Windows is a little more vulnerable and the users a little more naive. Also, most Mac and *nix users do not log in routinely using an administrator account, unlike the default on Windows.
This is why I’m ridiculously paranoid with my backups. I’ve had a computer literally go up and smoke the morning after a backup.
So grateful Apple’s Time Machine exists. I’ve had to do the very same thing multiple times. It has restored flawlessly every time. Still, makes me paranoid about all the IP I have on my system. Glad you didn’t suffer the ultimate catastrophic failure.
Nobody wants backups. What they want are restores. If you don’t periodically test your backups, to make sure stuff is actually there, you don’t really have backups.
Yeah, never trust a single point of failure. Well done on having a backup! 🙂 A second backup, so that you have three copies if things go twice bad, is greatly recommended now that the primary machine is proven flaky. For things that are important to not lose it is standard procedure to have a second backup that is stored in a different location, in case things go extra terribly bad.
The standard 3-2-1 rule also says that one of the copies should be on a different medium. But for all hard drives on earth to stop working at the same time I think we’ll have to wait until the magnetic field of the earth flips. That is scheduled to happen relatively soon though, perhaps in our lifetimes. So for things you want safe in that very extreme case you should still burn an optical disc. I have a total of 0 such discs.
Then again, my primary backup for my laptop is far too out of date right now, despite me having plans to make it so easy to update that I can do it daily. But that’s just plans. And my copies that I store at my parent’s place are several years old at this point. Not good. Thanks for the reminder!
I don’t think all hard drives would stop working when the magnetic field flips. First, the magnetic field itself is nowhere near that strong, problem is with radiation … and the radiation will have variable effects depending on where the disks will be, like if they are underground they will be safer.
Of course, it may take some time before we will be able to verify the disks are ok, because it probably destroys our power grid (or at least heavily damage it) and without the power grid, it will take a while to rebuild it …
Also, perhaps most importantly, direct your thanks to the right entity: past you! A great thankyou goes to the past Grace that did the backup! 🙂
I was very sloppy with backups a few years ago – the external hard disk connected to the time machine had stopped working and I was too lazy/stupid to get a new one. Then I the machine had a near catastrophic failure, which… somehow… it was able to recover from. I immediately bought a new machine and external hard drive and copied everything across. Time machine does very regular backup now.If what happened on Tuesday had happened a few years ago, it might have been a very big problem!
Cloud based backups are the way to go, just make sure you save the files where needed and, if necessary, pay the stupid bill. Using an external drive with the contents of the cloud backup is a must too. I’m lucky I had a recent backup when my cloud got erased. Only lost about 5 days worth of work because I took a break and played games for a few weeks.
oh, and a sync software with another hard drive works too. 😛 (My current setup)
if you are using a regular backup solution you want to do nightly incremental backups. Some enterprise systems like netapp log every write action. Rather than depending on full drive backups you should find a solution that backs up everything that has changed since the last backup on a nightly basis automatically. that way it isn’t depending on you rembering to backup. It may cost you some money, but what is the value of loosing every edit since you last manually backed up?