[Ham-Mac] Back Up Lesson Learned on Christmas Eve
Dick Kriss
aa5vu at arrl.net
Sat Dec 26 20:55:25 EST 2009
The good news and bad news is mixed bag. On Wednesday evening
23-Dec, I was moving a file and encountered a major screen freeze.
The freeze was so hard the OS X Force Quit would not let me quit the
frozen app or let me Re-launch the finder, so I used the button on the
back of the iMac to restart.
The restart resulted in a folder icon on a gray screen with nasty looking
question mark in the middle. I have never seen this before but had a
pretty good idea the two plus year old iMac's hard drive was toast. The
good news was I able to boot from an external hard drive that contained a
SuperDuper backup and a separate partition for the Time Machine. The Disk
Utility confirmed there was something wrong with the Macintosh HD.
I used the Apple Care web page to setup a technical support call for 8:00
AM Christmas Eve and at the same time I scheduled an appointment with
the local Genius Bar for 9:15 AM.
The 0800 tech support call confirmed the hard drive was most likely
toast and so did the 0915 visit to the Genius Bar. At 11:00 AM Christmas
Eve I picked up the iMac with a new hard drive and an Apple installed
generic OS X 10.6 installation.
My plan was to go home and use my most recent SuperDuper backup
to restore everything; however, the Apple tech suggested that when I
booted the iMac to use the option in the Welcome screen to Restore from
the Time Machine. This was the start of the really bad news.
The Time Machine restore worked but did not bring the iMac back to
where it was before the crash and many things would not run. I could
not print and the Get Info said it was only OS X 10.6, not the 10.6.2
I was using before the crash. I clicked on the software update and it
downloaded and installed all kinds of stuff. When the updater said it
needed to restart, the iMac crashed big time and was still at 10.6.0
after a restart.
After wasting too much time with the Time Machine, I booted from the
external hard drive and had SuperDuper, erase then copy its contents
to the Macintosh HD. It worked perfect and I was back in business.
Once I was sure things were working correct, I tried to run the Time
Machine and it could go back in time but could not back up. I don't
think the Time Machine could deal with the new media. At this point I
used the Disk Utility to erase the Time Machine partition and started over
with a clean back up. All seems well now.
Needless to say SuperDuper saved me and I have little on no faith
in the Time Machine for a total restore to new hard drive installed by
Apple.
My advice is do not relay totally on the Time Machine. Have another
back up plan and I recommend SuperDuper. It saved my six on
Christmas Eve.
Happy New Year
Ps: Santa delivered a new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
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