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OK – so I made a mistake. Everyone who knows anything about this always says run a disk verify before updating your Mac. And of course, I didn’t. And that was possibly why a few minutes into the Leopard upgrade it spat out some kind of message which said, in effect, ‘You must be joking! Expect to be able to install a nice, new, shiny operating system on this mess?’ And then it collapsed in a heap rendering my hard disk seriously brain damaged.
I said that was possibly the reason. of course, I’ll never know for sure. The Indian gentleman on the end of the AppleCare help line didn’t have a clue although he had adopted an odd English habit in that every time I told him I couldn’t understand him because of his accent, he repeated himself only louder!
So I had to perform a complete rebuild and that’s when you find out what you have lost. And it’s not the big stuff. Documents, spreadsheets, photo collection are all intact because I regularly back that sort of thing up. it’s the little things that go astray and often they are the ones that hurt the most. Half my address book is gone. My RSS feed subscription list vanished like snow on the water. Emails? Zap! And perhaps one of the most annoying, my Firefox bookmarks.
And the interesting thing is I have been using a commercial product called ChronoSync and have been copying email files, address book files and browser bookmarks to another machine for the past year. But when I went to look for it… it wasn’t there. So that’s one for the bin.
But at the end of the day, once again, my main gripe is with Apple. If everyone and his dog knows – well apart from me perhaps – that prior to an upgrade you should perform a verify disk, why doesn’t the upgrade do it for you?
I genuinely feel your pain, my PB G4 had the most minor failure – the on/off switch connection to the logic board, courtesy of some ham fisted ‘Apple Approved Repair Centre’ 2 years earlier, of course the issue only appeared when I switched my G4 off and could not restart it. So all the data sat nice and safe on my HDD, but as the lappy was my only Apple Machine, my other pc is Windows based and cannot read the lappy HDD.
Thankfully Ubuntu Linux will read all HDD formats – and a spare pc came to my rescue, but like you say, the irritation came my moving thing like my Firefox bookmarks over (I tended to keep the Windows Pc away from the internet), my Matlab command history etc, and getting into my MS Entourage emails and contacts.
I did learn however, that with fairly minimal work you find things like Firefox keeps all you bookmarks in a file called bookmarks.html, Matlab does the same in a file called history.m, iCal and Address book do similar things so now I back them up to a standalone HDD, formatted FAT32 because then anything will read it (Mac OSX is a bit iffy with NTFS and Windows will read no Mac format).
One day I will write a little script for both Mac and Win to store these things automatically.
I agree this shouldn’t be needed, but when it doesn’t ‘Just Work’, then the guy with shovel cleaning this up is me, and I had one week post crash to hand an MSc Control assignment in – so lesson learnt.
I have to say I was most angry about ChronoSync. This was the very reason I was using it. Great for cloning document folders and the like but get the ‘Library’ involved and despite telling me it was syncing OK the stuff was just nor where it should be.
I have been playing this morning with Automator which, to be honest, was worthless in Tiger. But now you can ‘record’ actions. I am building a script to archive all these odds and ends and then dupe the whole package to my iMac which, in turn, is running Time Machine. Ain’t going to get caught with my trousers down again.
Good to hear about Automator, I’ll give that a go once I have my Company Accounts finished – now if Automator can do them I would be a seriously happy bunny.
Shame about the ChronoSync – have you blasted off the snotty email yet ?
Malc
Actually, Automator is just the same heap of garbage it was before! Record a series of actions – like selecting a folder or file – and yes, it sort of works. But it remembers the folder or file by its physical position in the list. Add some new folders or files so the one you want moves down a bit, and Automator picks the one that is now at that old location.
Totally pointless.
Dude…I hear you. There are 3 things I fear the most: drowning, burning to death, and data loss. Give Mozy a try, they’ll back up everything on your system (works with Macs) for $5/mo. I mean everything as in unlimited data.
Try their free version, which you can backup 2 gb onto, or sign up…and if you don’t mind, use this link (https://mozy.com/registration/unlimited?ref=3f9a896b&kbid=38259&m=12) …I get a kickback for everyone that signs up.
Thanks!
I would add that there are some really nice and free services for syncing your things on-line, that I might recommend backup and cross-computers/os/disks survival:
bookmarks:
this firefox extension syncs all your firefox installations:
http://www.foxmarks.com/
alternatively, a nice cross browser option:
http://www.google.com/bookmarks
email, contacts, chats, docs (excel, word, ppt ecc.)
I’m super happy with google for domains (you can have your mail @yourdomain.com served by google). Definitely it’s worth to try their free gmail + imap sync with mail client and the incredibly efficient google docs for getting rid of micorsoft office:
https://www.google.com/a/smallbiz/
rss feed subscription:
well, I really love google applications:
http://www.google.com/reader/
hope that you find these information useful as much as I found your tips and plug-ins on swordfish!
happy Christmas
Giovanni
I have an aversion to backing up over the net to some nameless place far, far away! Don’t know why. Although I have a huge aversion to Google!
I’m OK now with regular syncs set up and using Time Machine to an external HD.