Always wait for backup
Apr. 25th, 2014 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiSo my computer crashed Sunday morning. Not unheard of, of course. But it didn't come back this time. It's a four-year-old MacBook, and I did my damnedest to start things, but it wouldn't load into safe mode, wouldn't restart, and a verbose startup showed a catalog error. Starting in repair mode told me it couldn't repair things.
I finally gave up all hope, reformatted, and reinstalled (aside -- the net-based repair mode is kind of awesome). The system's working fine now.
But I lost so much stuff. I preach the same thing everyone who works in computing does. Back stuff up. Use the cloud. Etc. But it's been ages since I've done a full backup, and for space reasons, a lot of what I had is stuff I might not have bothered with anyway. And much of my stuff is safe, because I did have backups, or used the cloud, or somesuch. But I lost so many small things. TV shows and movies I'd meant to watch. Games I'd installed. Small productivity apps I probably won't remember for ages*. And two years of content in Scrivener. That last one includes a bunch of PW reviews and a few dozen smatterings that had the potential to become fiction or essays. Through in another dozen half-completed LJ entries (I use an offline client called AsLJ, in part because I've been burned too many times by browser crashes when composing on the site), and god knows what else.
Oh, and my entire music library.
Of course, between Amazon and iTunes, I was able to recreate at least part of that last one. And I did upload a bunch of stuff to Google Music, which I've re-downloaded. But there were dozens of CDs that I've ripped over the years that weren't backed up, weren't stuff I bought at Amazon, etc. And of those songs I had at iTunes, Amazon, and Google, not everything's a keeper; I can either pick and choose when I download (an extra-royal pain), or Likewise, my Podcasts are toast, and I've had to resubscribe and download all of them.
This has given me a new appreciation of all my cloud-based tools, from Evernote to Dropbox to Google Drive (which has become a must-use tool at work, so thankfully very little was lost on that front). And you have no idea how thankful I am that Turbotax Online saves copies of all of my returns.
It's also given me one of those weird feelings of relief; horrible as it is to lose all that virtual stuff, it's also hard to deny that I'm a virtual hoarder. Some of the stuff I've lost is irreplaceable, but some subset of that stuff is stuff that no one should ever care about replacing in the first place. I could spend time wallowing in all that I've lost (and I won't deny spending a little bit of time on the topic). But I'd rather move on. I'm using this as an excuse to at least make my virtual workspace organized, take care of using backups, and make sure I'm working with (and taking advantage of) all the tools to prevent another disaster.
*While writing this post, I had to open a file and realized I didn't have TextWrangler installed, for example.
I finally gave up all hope, reformatted, and reinstalled (aside -- the net-based repair mode is kind of awesome). The system's working fine now.
But I lost so much stuff. I preach the same thing everyone who works in computing does. Back stuff up. Use the cloud. Etc. But it's been ages since I've done a full backup, and for space reasons, a lot of what I had is stuff I might not have bothered with anyway. And much of my stuff is safe, because I did have backups, or used the cloud, or somesuch. But I lost so many small things. TV shows and movies I'd meant to watch. Games I'd installed. Small productivity apps I probably won't remember for ages*. And two years of content in Scrivener. That last one includes a bunch of PW reviews and a few dozen smatterings that had the potential to become fiction or essays. Through in another dozen half-completed LJ entries (I use an offline client called AsLJ, in part because I've been burned too many times by browser crashes when composing on the site), and god knows what else.
Oh, and my entire music library.
Of course, between Amazon and iTunes, I was able to recreate at least part of that last one. And I did upload a bunch of stuff to Google Music, which I've re-downloaded. But there were dozens of CDs that I've ripped over the years that weren't backed up, weren't stuff I bought at Amazon, etc. And of those songs I had at iTunes, Amazon, and Google, not everything's a keeper; I can either pick and choose when I download (an extra-royal pain), or Likewise, my Podcasts are toast, and I've had to resubscribe and download all of them.
This has given me a new appreciation of all my cloud-based tools, from Evernote to Dropbox to Google Drive (which has become a must-use tool at work, so thankfully very little was lost on that front). And you have no idea how thankful I am that Turbotax Online saves copies of all of my returns.
It's also given me one of those weird feelings of relief; horrible as it is to lose all that virtual stuff, it's also hard to deny that I'm a virtual hoarder. Some of the stuff I've lost is irreplaceable, but some subset of that stuff is stuff that no one should ever care about replacing in the first place. I could spend time wallowing in all that I've lost (and I won't deny spending a little bit of time on the topic). But I'd rather move on. I'm using this as an excuse to at least make my virtual workspace organized, take care of using backups, and make sure I'm working with (and taking advantage of) all the tools to prevent another disaster.
*While writing this post, I had to open a file and realized I didn't have TextWrangler installed, for example.
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(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-25 05:00 pm (UTC)Digital preservation is obviously My Deal, so I do actually do backups. One of my professors asked us how we dealt with backups and apparently I was the ONLY person in the class who had an actual system. Time Machine isn't perfect (and I only do it about once a week, but that means my backups go back WAY further), but it's better than nothing. But I need something remote; I need another location. I do put a bunch of stuff on Flickr and Dropbox, and I pay for Backupify for my Google services (and twitter and facebook, though I'm not sure how useful that really is). It's not that expensive, and it gives me peace of mind.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-25 06:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-25 10:01 pm (UTC)Multiple backups of data helps too...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-26 02:09 am (UTC)My own standby is good ol Time Machine. It comes with the Mac, all you need is an external drive bigger than your Mac's, set it up and forget it, blah blah blah. But you know that.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-27 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-05 04:19 am (UTC)I know in theory I can get MP3s of my purchased albums... But thus far I have not been able to get that to work. I will grant that I am stupid about these newfangled options!