The Worst Time

The worst time to test your multi-tiered backup scheme is when you need to, and only by a bit of luck and irony, I escaped a test I didn't study for.

On Thursday night things started getting weird on my computer. Sasami, my almost six-year-old iMac, started having some problems. They looked decidedly software related, as Apple apps were willing to go as far a putting up their menus, but do anything? Not a chance. Huh. iCould idiocy was my first assumption, and since Scrivener worked just fine, as did most everything else, and non-computer happenings were more important, I moved on. I'd deal with a later, a reboot, and after all, there's hardly anything an IPL can't cure.

By Friday morning the digital pestilence spread, still confined to Apple apps. Perennially brain damaged iTunes was the next zombified app, with dialogs about not finding my phone refusing to close. Time for that therapeutic reboot.

It wouldn't shutdown. Spiffy, just spiffy. Power button time; gray screen. A persistent gray screen at that, with no chomped fruit to indicate anything was happening. Well, not the first time the old girl's done this, so I waited it out, and about ten minutes later I got a login prompt. Password accepted (good, good) and then nothing. Lots of nothing.

Reboot number two. Same deal. Yes, this would be about panic time, would it not? But, pesky old work still existed, so I let it sit there. All day. And it did.

Now, being the paranoid loon I am, I've got lots of back ups. I have two flash drives that I rotate to keep off-site copies of the most valuable files. Then there is CrashPlan, with versioned backups in the cloud and one locally on an external drive. With it, I can grab things with a phone app, which is what I did. I got Thursday night's backup of "Hippogriff" on the phone, and then mailed to my son. I'd be damned if I was going to lose those last to chapters I've been working on.

Now, one reason I chose Scrivener as a writing platform, besides that it was on sale when I bought it, was the way it dealt with data. Each project is really a directory, and while the name of the file containing a scene is funky, it's just an RTF file, so you can piece the manuscript back together if things get real bad. But I wasn't about to head down that path—yet.

After work, I raced home. I wanted to do something with the computer, anything, but I was meeting a friend for dinner. By the way, it was yummy, and he bought, so a double win. But before we headed out, I wanted to make one more go at it, in particular booting up in verbose mode so I could watch the system console and see where things went to hell.

Holding ⌘-V while rebooting still left me with a gray, gray screen. Wow. Okay. So let's isolate everything, which meant pulling the network cable, all the USB accessories, and the external drive chain I use for those local back ups. Well, the latter was the easiest to work with, so after a reaching over the stack of Raritys sitting atop the enclosure, I slide the power switch to off. Oh, yeah: I was still holding down ⌘-V, waiting for some sign of life.

Holy Hades! The minute the drive went off, the whole system booted faster than I've seen it do so in about six months. After entering my password, the boot drive decrypted in no time flat, and I was back in biz. Huh, again.

The enclosure is old and has been problematic, thanks OWC, but the platters in there are new. Its interface is FW800 and USB-3, but I use USB-2, because 2011 iMac, remember? But it's not just a single drive, it's a chain: downstream is an old, old, incredibly old, FW drive. Once the Mac booted, it was time to do some tests. I flipped the enclosure's power on, and—presto!—the aptly named "Data" drive mounted and decrypted. But not that FW one.

So the only lossage here was time and a hand-me-down 2T drive and copy number three of my audio and video file. Well... add a bit of stomach lining to the list too. But the potential loss of data was close, because CrashPlan's getting out of the personal back up business, I wasn't sure I could use either the local or the cloud data on another box. There's still the phone, but, yeah-no. I'll be looking for a way to get access to both copies of my data on another machine pretty darn soon.

But Celia and Meadow, and all the griffons are safe, and I can get back to work on "Hippogriff" without further delay. Thank the four winds for that!

As always, thanks for reading. — OGM