Bacon Saved! Thanks SuperDuper!
It’s a cliché to say backups are an insurance policy but it’s true in so many ways. In particular, you never know if the policy is worth the money until you actually have to use it. I’ve been using SuperDuper! and an external drive as my and Julieanne’s insurance and, after a nasty hard drive crash, I’m happy to say it has been worth every cent.
Julieanne’s trusty G4 iBook had faithfully served her through the last couple of years of her PhD research, seeing her through the writing of many papers, the wrangling of many citations and the interminable editing and re-editing of “The National Audience”. Two days later the little trooper started making a strange clicking sound before hanging, only to reboot and ominously flash a question mark over a folder.
My (and her) initial panic was assuaged slightly when I realised I had backed-up her machine the day after she printed off the review copy of her thesis. As an added bonus it turned out the iBook had come with a very generous three year warranty. After a quick visit to the local Mac store I was told it would be fixed for free and back to me in a week. Sure enough, I had it back a week later with a new and less clicky hard drive. Better still it didn’t cost me a cent.
Now came the moment of truth. Would the backup I had made before the crash restore the iBook to its former glory?
After a quick skim through the SuperDuper! user’s guide I found a section entitled “Recovering from a disaster” which had a step-by-step guide to restoring a machine from a backup.
The first step was “Start up from the OS X Install disc” which immediately presented two problems: 1) where was my install disk, and 2) how to I get the iBook to bypass booting from the fresh system that was put on the new hard drive? Neither problems were too onerous. The install disk was with all my other computer related crap and a quick search revealed that I should hold the “C” key down while the machine starts up to get it to boot from the DVD drive.
The fresh copy of OS X on the newly refurbished machine posed another problem. Following the SuperDuper! instructions to the letter meant the Disk Utility program attempted to copy the backed-up version of Julieanne’s stuff to a new partition on the hard drive. Since there was only 30GB on it the restore failed.
It turns out that the little checkbox labelled “Erase Destination” needed to be switch to on. Once I did this the restore when seamlessly.
After about half an hour, and with baited breath, I restarted the machine and was very relieved to see Julieanne’s desktop background appear. Relief turned to awe as all her startup items fired up and the mess of desktop icons all appeared in their former places. To top it off, the Finder windows that she had open when the machine died popped up too.
Now that’s a backup!
No comments
Leave a new comment