tail -f development.log

Why do we, the “computer people” (those who are developers or IT people), seem to be the ones who fail to backup our systems more than anyone else? We often stress the importance of frequently “backing up your data” yet, at least in the circles I run in, we seem to fail to backup our data ourselves.

Yes, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I had a hard drive crash last night on my macbook. While using the laptop I started to hear the dreaded “clicking noise” coming from the hard drive and the computer refused to shut down. After shutting down the computer forcefully by the power button, I was greeted to this lovely screen on reboot.

Yes, I had never backed up the macbook before. I was simply too lazy to carry the laptop downstairs and plug it into either of the two external hard drives I use for backup. I booted of the OS X install DVD and ran disk utility and found that the drive couldn’t be repaired due to an “invalid B-tree node size” error. This was a replacement 100GB Hitachi Travelstar hard drive that I installed myself a week after I purchased the macbook. Luckily for me the original 60GB drive was still sitting pretty downstairs in my office so I swapped them out quickly and was at least able to use the macbook again.

But, I now have to cross my fingers and hope that I can do some data recovery off the “dead” drive with Data Rescue II. Yeah, I had already purchsed a copy of Data Rescue II because I had a hard drive crash previously and DR II saved my life in that case. Even after the previous crash I still have been neglecting proper backups. Serves me right, its my own fault. I’ve been too cheap to purchase a license for Super Duper!, which is required to run scheduled backups, and instead been backing up manually “when I remember.” Well, I think the time has come to spend the $28 and buy a license and run a backup every night! On the laptop as well.

The computer was mostly used by my wife as her personal machine, so the main data that might be lost is several thousand digital photos. Other than that, there were a few documents, some receipts, my whole parallels installation that I used to do my Quicken finances, and some source code (most of which is also in SVN so I’m sparred in that department).

Frustrating? Yes! Very frustrating. Will I learn my lesson this time? I hope so.