Monday, November 2, 2009

Filesystem corrupted - the bad news and the good


Stream, originally uploaded by jiihaa.


Leaf carpet, originally uploaded by jiihaa.


Roadside, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Do you have a current backup of your photographs and software? Luckily I had.

During the weekend I lost all files on the iMac at home, due to filesystem corruption. This happened when I needed to move the computer to another room, and it didn't start up any more. Before that the iMac had been running over 38 days in succession without problems.

Luckily I had a backup, which was less than one hour old, on the Time Machine backup disk. Long story short, after initializing the disk, installing Mac OS X from scratch and copying all data (over 500 GB of it) from the Time Machine backup disk, we are back to normal. (This took over four hours.)

Now everything works. All settings are the way they were and all software and files were preserved as they were.

But a small worry is nagging: perhaps the problem will reappear?

On the other hand, the computer seems faster, which may be due to a "fresh" Mac OS X installation. The previous system was upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, always on top of the previous one. Than may have been one reason for the problem.

So, now that I have been warned, I'll be even more diligent about backups.

Here are three photographs taken today, when the sun had set. A clouded night as has been so often lately.

2 comments:

Markus Spring said...

This is a fact that everybody learns - systems do fail. It's not a question of *if*, only of *when*. Oh, and Dr. Murphy is never far away...
Good to hear that the restore of your backup went without troubles but even had a positive effect in the end! And this is the second, even more important fact: backups don't matter, only restores do.

But away from the technicalities: That first image with the mixed light and the cold blue sky really does speak to me of winter.

Juha Haataja said...

Indeed - if you never test that the backup works you might as well never take them. A lesson learned...