Surviving a Hard Drive Crash

As you know, I'm frantic about backup. I use a Time Capsule with Time Machine along with nightly clones with SuperDuper while at home. I also use an online backup service called Mozy for off-site backup of mission critical files which runs in the background on a regular basis whenever I have an internet connection.

Last week, I was traveling and was away from home Thursday - Wednesday. While on the road I did not have access to my SuperDuper or TIme Mchine backup. However, I do make a point whenever I go out of town to backup just before I leave so I did have full backups to both methods as of Thursday morning. I was in a hotel on Monday night attending a convention for work when I turned on my computer and nothing happened. I'd hit the power key, the gray screen with the apple logo would appear, the little pinwheel would turn 5 or 6 times and the machine would power off. After multiple attempts I booted into single user mode and tried to run the fsck (file system check) utility command. It exited on error saying something like "error -8 file system structure" and could not repair the machine. Without any other utilities, I was stuck until I got home.

Once home the next day, I ran disk utility from the install CD and found again that there was a File Structure error but it could not be repaired. Now, this is likely something that could have been fixed by DiskWarrior but I haven't upgraded to the latest version that is Leopard compatible. Yes, I know, dumb move on my part. I was able to boot from my SuperDuper clone off a FireWire external hard drive that I had made the Thursday before and ran the Apple Hardware Tests to confirm (as best I could) there were no underlying hardware damage. As far as I can tell (and thankfully all is still well) this was simply a case of file structure corruption and not drive failure. The week prior, I had been having trouble with my battery and my machine would hard power down without any notice or warning. In fact, I had already requested a new battery from AppleCare, but it hadn’t arrived yet and my machine suffered several losses of power without notice in the last several days. My guess is this was likely the cause of the corruption and my problem.

With the knowledge that I had my SuperDuper and Time Machine backups from Thursday morning and various Mozy backups throughout the weekend, I erased the drive, reformatted it and reinstalled Leopard. I then used the Migration assistant to restore my data from my last known good Thursday clone. Now, the obvious question here may be why did I choose to go this route rather than restoring directly from the clone or from my Time Machine backup? Three answers. One, I’m a glutton for punishment. Two, I wasn’t sure how far the data corruption spread so wanted to make sure I had a good clean operating system. Three, just because that’s how I roll.

So, within two hours of getting home things were looking pretty good, I recovered 100% of my files from my backup on Thursday. But it was now Wednesday which meant that I lost everything I did on my computer from Thursday afternoon through Tuesday morning or at least 5 days of data. It wasn’t much, a handful of emails I had already read, a few small documents, nothing earth shattering or irreplacable. This is a common hole in many backup methods. What do you do if something happens and you haven’t been able to backup your computer in a while?

In most cases, you’d be screwed and you’d just have to be satisfied with recovering all but the last five days worth of data. But a 99% data recovery isn’t good enough for me. Thankfully, I use a service called Mozy which allows me to backup certain files and folders on an automatic basis to external web space. Mozy performs a backup in the background several times a day so long as your computer is connected to the internet. So all the while when I was traveling and online, my files were being regularly backed up. Using Mozy's recovery tool, I was able to recover the half dozen or so files that edited or created over the weekend and restore my computer nearly 100% to it's pre-crash state. I'm guessing I likely lost a copy of an email or two, but so far I have yet to find a missing file. 

A few things to take away from this experience...
1) Bad things can happen at any time and without any warning.
2) Even the best backup strategies can have holes, make sure you evaluate your plan and you can live with what you're able to recover. In my case, I would have lost the documents I worked on while traveling had it not been for Mozy backing up in the background.
3) It's probably a good idea to travel with a copy of your system restore CDs, Utilities, and backups when you're away for any length of time. You’ll also want to make sure you have the most up to date tools that are compatible with your system.
4) Having a comprehensive backup plan in place turns a nightmare into a mere annoyance.

If you want more information on Mozy, you can sign up for a free trial with 2.2 GB of free backup space here: https://mozy.com/?code=6LULV1