Last week was a challenging week for me. Last Sunday, I tried to turn on my computer, and, well, it didn't. I spent most of the morning that I had planned to use to get ahead during the week, trying to troubleshoot what was wrong. I finally gave up and called Apple support and proceeded to go through all those same steps again with Cristophor on the phone. His conclusion? The hard drive was dead. Luckily, I have Apple Care for that computer, so Cristophor set up an appointment with the local Apple store, and I took it in. There the Genius (I forget his name, sorry) hooked up a cable to the computer and after a few minutes confirmed that the hard drive was dead and the optical drive was failing. He took my computer and said they would be replacing the hard drive and optical drive over the next 1–3 days.

I didn't get the computer back until Thursday. Then I started the restore process from my Time Machine backup. Of course, what I didn't notice was that the backup I was using was from my first Time Machine drive, not my current one. When the machine restarted, it was restored back to July 2011. Oops! So Thursday night I started the restore process again, this time using the right backup!

Friday morning I got up and saw that there was an update to Lion, 10.7.3, so I ran that and then started doing some work, writing some articles, and so on. I noticed that there were some glitches, but nothing too bad, and I thought they would be cured by a restart. So when I was done working I shut down for the day, as usual.

Saturday I turned on the computer to check some mail, and noticed the glitches were worse. In fact, I couldn't open some of my critical programs like Solitaire and more importantly, no web browsers would open, nor would Finder. After some research using my iPad I discovered that the update to Lion 10.7.3 was screwing up a lot of systems. It sounds like my situation was a bit more serious than most, because I couldn't even get Finder to work. And ultimately, I had to restore from my Time Machine backup a third time. This time I restored to right before I updated to 10.7.3.

Backups Saved Me

I was saved both by Time Machine, which was able to restore my system back to Friday morning, but also by my secondary backups of data on Dropbox. Time Machine brought my computer back to the living, and Dropbox made sure that all the work I'd done on Friday was not lost.

If you don't have both your personal machine and your website backed up on a regular basis, you will eventually live to regret that. I know. This week was challenging, as I had to do work on my iPad or not at all, but if I hadn't had backups I would have been starting from scratch. Before I had regular backups I once deleted my entire home directory on my web server. I much prefer this method. Restoring from backups takes time, but it's a lot faster and easier than trying to rebuild a site from memory.