Not my best week...
Remember boys and girls, always, always, always have a backup.
So, on Monday, the powerbook (which has all my mail on it (going back about 3 years), my Perl 6 Summary archive and the scripts I use to publish it, a GNUS setup that took years to get to its current point and a bunch of tunes that had to be recorded off vinyl) decided to go down and reach a state where fsck couldn’t fix it (but where it could be mounted).
Um… backups? What are those?
Ah well, plug it into the little firewire drive that could and get the .dotfiles, mail archive &c. backed up, check the backup and reinstall OS X. Easy.
On Thursday (busy week) I got things in a sane state - backups restored, working spamassassin and MTA - pulled down the best part of a week’s worth of mail, read a few messages and installed a bit more software. Which demanded a reboot. Which didn’t complete.
Argh! Don’t panic! Install OS X on the iPod, boot off that and go exploring. Nothing. Disk utils can’t even find a volume on there. A week of mail gone.
Damn, damn, damn.
Time to restore from the backups again. So, I plug in the little firewire drive that couldn’t be arsed this time and there’s nothing there.
Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.
The problem is, I have absolutely no sympathy for myself for doing this. After all, if the data were really important to me, I’d have a backup wouldn’t I?
Ah well, this particular horse may have bolted, but I’ll be picking up a tape drive this week. Okay, so a grand is a lot to drop on something you hope you’ll never have to use, but I really don’t ever want to go through this week’s pain again.
