Last Friday I had the unfortunate experience of my hard-drive frying itself. Now, this isn’t exactly something I haven’t experienced before, but it is the first time I’ve been threatened with downtime and data loss since going solo in the land of employment. Needless to say it’s a jarring experience that I will, choice being involved of course, choose to never have again. The only shining light in the entire process was the Time Capsule sitting in the corner of my office.1
Since getting the Time Capsule (a wonderful birthday present from my wife) I have been understandably sceptical about its core function of continuously backing up, wirelessly, from my laptop, all the time – with the easy ability to restore things when I stuff up. Only having to test its abilities once with an accidental email account deletion, when my hard-drive flopped on Friday I wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the possibilities of getting my data back from it fully.
But, as I write this, my machine is essentially back to normal. All I had to do was, grab a new hard-drive, have a friend help me get it in my MacBook Pro, whack in the Leopard installer disk, pick the “restore from backup” menu item and then go to bed. Woke up the next day and my machine was looking at me as if to say “What? How long was I asleep?” – everything back to normal.
Also to note, anyone who’s having an issue with their Time Capsule backups becoming “Read only” which mine did a few weeks ago (and thankfully I fixed this before my ‘event’ happened) – the solutions can be found here: Time Capsule errors | Luckyspin.org.
1. The uselessness of the location of my backup being sitting essentially next to the machine that it’s backing up can be a topic of discussion at another point in time.