What I learned from crashing
Published on May 4, 2010 3:28:34 p.m. by Robert
5 comments
Filed under: Personal
My MacBook Pro showed some weird behavior over the last weeks: Apps didn't launch, some froze and shutting down MacOS without brute-force-pressing the power button was a rare matter. So I thought, why not try a fresh install of OSX - probably not a bad idea after a few years collecting clutter. And while I released the mouse button after clicking on the "Erase Disk" button I wondered if I had a working backup.
Well, of course it wasn't that unthoughtful. I use TimeMachine for doing my local backups and additional run Crashplan for offsite storage. So I had a good feeling of spring-cleaning freshness while I was watching the progress bar of the Snow Leopard installer. The weird thing is that even on the freshly installed system the problems I had previously persisted - it was impossible to reboot the machine, eventually even Finder refused to start. Only after the 3rd install (and in each case it was a clean install on a freshly formatted hard disk) signs of kaputtheit vanished.
Eventually I started to reinstall all my applications and restored my user data and certain preferences. At least that was the plan, because TimeMachine told me that the sparseimage was broken (why didn't it tell me some hours ago when the backup ran through?). Finder also refused to open it. So I thought: Good that you have a second security layer, namely Crashplan.
What I didn't consider was that restoring 160GB of data (that's without the OS) takes some time. Even though I have a 50 MBit internet connection, the typical download rate from Crashplan Central varies between a few kBits up to 1-2 MBit. Estimated time of arrival: 4-15 days from now.
So, my conclusions for now are:
- it pays off to have at least two backup strategies
- it would be better to have even three
After my fresh install I now also have a local backup created by the Crashplan client, stored on my Drobo in the utility room downstairs.
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Robert is TYPO3 Phoenix and FLOW3 founding dev, espresso lover, optimist and proud husband and father.
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Good luck with your restore. Did you actually found out what was wrong with the notebook? Is it okay now or will you live in constant fear now? ;-)
What a mess. Happy that my last "spring cleanup" did not show any problems...
Nice post - and good to read you are back on the road. My time-capsule sparesebundle broke 4 Weeks ago. The backup process worked fine. After running into the next backup-cycle timemachine could not connect to my time capsule - the process took forever and my processors ran hot.
After some researching the guilty was found - broken sparsebundle. As far as I know there is NO way to detect or avoid this problem permaturely.
Conclusion: Timemachine is no valid standalone backup solution. Still its damn convinient during the smaller recoveries.
Crashplan sounds interesting - I'll have take a look at it.
I guess you just never have enough backup. I have two external disks in different locations and using different systems (Time Machine in the office and Carbon Copy Cloner at home). I'm thinking of using some online backup system for the personal documents...
This morning my Crashplan client surprised me with a 100% restored message (at least for my important work data), so it didn't take that long to restore as I feared.
However, Crashplan is - and they don't claim the contrary - a file backup solution, it doesn't enable you to restore a full system. So I'll continue using it as the last resort safety net and for quickly restore certain files. Because - what I forgot to mention - they have a very decent deduplication algorithm which transfers only parts of files which have changed, it's easy to keep almost all data for years. It even recognizes moved files and doesn't transmit their data again.
OTOH, there's nothing as convenient as restoring a whole system from a TimeMachine backup – if it's not corrupted.