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AYAAW Back In Action
07, Mar 2009 06:51
Whew! We’ve been absent too long and want to tell you why. Our production machine, a 24” Intel Core 2 Duo iMac began a long, slow spiral into sluggishness the likes of which we’ve never seen before. It was bad: click, SBOD, click, SBOD, click, SBOD. You get the picture. Being the small outfit that we are we didn’t have a good backup plan (by backup play we mean alternate plans set in place in case of emergencies) in place before having to resort to a complete erase of our hard drive and reinstallation of OS X and all our apps.
In terms of actual backing up, we had a Time Machine backup in place and we Carbon Copy Cloned our hard drive to another external FireWire hard drive. When the iMac’s sluggishness finally pushed us over the edge we nuked the hard drive and started the arduous process of bringing it back to life. Two weeks later and we’re finally back in business, literally.
It was not fun. The Maxtor FireWire drive we used for our clone hasn’t outright failed but it certainly has issues and about half of our clone had incorrect permissions applied. Not only that but a goodly portion of our Documents folder had been somehow corrupted in the process. So, we thought we could just restore from our good old reliable Time Machine backup. Not! Despite creating what we thought was an exact duplicate of our old account, Time Machine wouldn’t restore any files: none, nada, zilch, zero. In fact, it just put the little red Stop sign symbol on every folder, basically giving us the finger when we tried to restore anything.
The moral of our sad little story is that you shouldn’t count on Time Machine to completely restore after an erase of your hard drive and reinstallation of OS X. Its great for restoring the occasional email or file you accidently deleted but for heavier duty, like providing a complete backup for your hard drive that you can make a complete restore from, we’re not sold on it. Certainly, plenty of folks have been able to restore from it, we couldn’t though. As for the other half of our backup plan we’re blaming that on Maxtor/Seagate and are just going to toss that bad boy in the recycling bin. We’re chocking it up to bad luck and moving on.
Fortunately we didn’t lose anything critical and we’re now back up and running.
In terms of actual backing up, we had a Time Machine backup in place and we Carbon Copy Cloned our hard drive to another external FireWire hard drive. When the iMac’s sluggishness finally pushed us over the edge we nuked the hard drive and started the arduous process of bringing it back to life. Two weeks later and we’re finally back in business, literally.
It was not fun. The Maxtor FireWire drive we used for our clone hasn’t outright failed but it certainly has issues and about half of our clone had incorrect permissions applied. Not only that but a goodly portion of our Documents folder had been somehow corrupted in the process. So, we thought we could just restore from our good old reliable Time Machine backup. Not! Despite creating what we thought was an exact duplicate of our old account, Time Machine wouldn’t restore any files: none, nada, zilch, zero. In fact, it just put the little red Stop sign symbol on every folder, basically giving us the finger when we tried to restore anything.
The moral of our sad little story is that you shouldn’t count on Time Machine to completely restore after an erase of your hard drive and reinstallation of OS X. Its great for restoring the occasional email or file you accidently deleted but for heavier duty, like providing a complete backup for your hard drive that you can make a complete restore from, we’re not sold on it. Certainly, plenty of folks have been able to restore from it, we couldn’t though. As for the other half of our backup plan we’re blaming that on Maxtor/Seagate and are just going to toss that bad boy in the recycling bin. We’re chocking it up to bad luck and moving on.
Fortunately we didn’t lose anything critical and we’re now back up and running.
AYAAW Site Redesign
18, Dec 2008 04:43
We’re also wrapping up the migration of all old posts to the new blog engine so you’ll have complete access to archived entries as well. Speaking of blog entries, because we changed our blog engine, the RSS Feed has also changed. Unfortunately that means the old bookmark you were using won’t ever update anymore and you need to start using the new one which is:
RSS Feed (you can also find this link in the sidebar)Hopefully these changes haven’t disrupted you too much and going forward will make for a better visitor experience for all.
Thank you for your understanding.
AYAAW
Help Us Keep The Lights On!
01, Oct 2008 13:35
You might have noticed the small, inconspicuous "Donate" button located down below the Google Ads on the left hand side of the page. If not, go there now. Okay, now that you're back did you donate? To help AYAAW keep the lights on and the top-notch news and reviews coming, please consider making a small (please, no donations over $250,000) donation. I doubt it would be tax deductible or anything like that but making a donation would make you feel good inside. At least it will us.
So, I'm calling on all AYAAW readers (all two of you) to pony up and make a contribution to the AYAAW cause. You'll receive nothing in return except continued news and reviews AYAAW style and perhaps a little good karma. If those things are important to you then you know what to do.
Return to your post now. Good luck and good night.
So, I'm calling on all AYAAW readers (all two of you) to pony up and make a contribution to the AYAAW cause. You'll receive nothing in return except continued news and reviews AYAAW style and perhaps a little good karma. If those things are important to you then you know what to do.
Return to your post now. Good luck and good night.