I was in the process of doing a complete backup of my MacBook's hard disk drive when I noticed some strange sounds emanating from under the wrist rest. Yes, it was the click-click of death.
Hard drives only ever fail when you're in a precarious situation. Either you're about to do an important presentation or you're suspicious of your backups. Because we all do backups, right?
Not only do I do backups, but I even test them! I've been using TimeMachine since it came out and I love it. About a week ago it began complaining that something wasn't right so I took a peek at the backups and found that it was corrupt. No matter, I'd only ever used the facility once in the past year, so I wasn't too worried. I had the original media (my hard drive), right?
At this point I should have gone to MicroCenter and purchased a third mirror for my TimeMachine's RAID array. Let the mirror sync, then break the mirror on this third drive.
There's not a whole lot of free space on my .5TB TimeMachine volume: we've got three systems backing up to it. So I deleted the "corrupt" copy of my machine's backup and started a new backup.
And this is where I started hearing my click-click of death.
Between the partial TimeMachine backup and the externally-mounted original laptop's SATA drive, I have just about all the files I need. Still need to download a few programs (probably needed new versions anyway), but overall, I'm pretty happy. About the only thing (and it's a big one) missing is the directory with the pictures. It's not on the partial TimeMachine backup and the drive shows a file when it should be a directory. Hmmm
So I lost some pictures (fairly big deal) but I also lost a lot of time. Every non-working moment for the past four days has been spent messing with this dratted issue. Seriously. I have a couple more ideas on how to retrieve the pictures directory. But I'll never get the time back. And that's a big deal.
