Lotus Rock Star :: Third time's a charm

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As much as I love my MacBook Pro, losing a drive to physical crash is maddening. It happened to me in the beginning of December - on the road, the night before three days of client meetings. Then the replacement drive (ordered by my Apple store in KC) arrived a few days later, they replaced it, could not convert data, so I had a clean new machine. I reinstalled my Time Machine backup in an hour and was back in business. Stuff happens.

Stuff keeps happening. Last week in DC, the same exact thing happened on the night I arrived for a 6-day trip. Different hotel, different city, same client (so I've conveniently blamed them). Physical hard disk crash, total loss. This time I was able to visit an Apple store in DC. They verified it was toast, which allowed me to call the KC store and get a disk on order for when I returned. They also set up an appointment for me over the phone, which their answering system says they cannot do, but given my inability to visit the website to schedule it, they took pity on me. So the third drive arrived yesterday, I hooked up to Time Machine, restored...but this time something was missing. My entire VM of Windows XP. Everything I'd done since December in Windows was gone. I have an idea why - I had just converted to using TM over wireless - but need to test the theory. And keep one in reserve at the office just in case.

Fortunately, I kept my Sony up to date. So at the moment, while the Mac is doing a disk surface scan as a precaution, I'm producing a new VM from the Sony to transfer over. Should take about 3 hours for 60 GB. I'll be missing some files, but for the most part I had been saving anything critical over to the Mac's folders anyway, working in Windows only when absolutely necessary. That is less and less, but Domino Designer, Administrator, a few utilities and two customer VPNs still require me to load it up.

The shine has worn off my Mac experience a bit, but let me tell you - if this had happened to the Sony a year ago, I'd still be toast.

And even though losing a laptop even for a couple days is pretty much hell, what happened Sunday made up for it all. Another post, later today. As soon as my Mac is whole again.

Comments

1 - Interesting that you should post this today. I just read that VMWARE was automatically marking it's file to be excluded from a TimeMachine backup. Probably due to the size and that just starting the VM would make it a changed file and thus your TimeMachine drive would fill very quickly.

Here's some info on it and also a way to list the files that are excluded from TimeMachine { Link }

Posted by Declan Lynch At 12:54:45 PM On 04/04/2008 | - Website - |

2 - Here is some emor information and a method to make sure Time Machine does indeed backup your VM's : { Link }

Posted by Declan Lynch At 01:01:58 PM On 04/04/2008 | - Website - |

3 - Yup. Dec's way ahead of me. Understandable, as VM images are huge, and will always change.

I also run Mozy (mozy.com) inside my VM's, and of course all notes work is replicated onto servers. I also tend to take snapshots now and again...

Time to get an SSD disk ? No moving parts..

--* Bill

Posted by Wild Bill At 01:27:23 PM On 04/04/2008 | - Website - |

4 - @Dec - that's right now I remember, VMWare Fusion added the 'exclusion" to 1.1, which I installed after the first HD replacement. So that explains why it's not there.

My new one is creating 2 GB files, as it's writing to a FAT USB drive. I haven't found anything saying it's better or worse as separate files, so I'm planning to use them instead.

@Bill, I'm all over SSD - as soon as they're >200GB!

Posted by Rob Novak At 02:19:12 PM On 04/04/2008 | - Website - |

5 - Yep, I lost a VMware image when I put the 320gb drive in the MacBook Pro. No major loss, though, because I still kinda prefer Parallels. I *have* ditched my BootCamp partition finally.

Posted by Turtle At 04:52:57 PM On 04/04/2008 | - Website - |

6 - I share your pain. I converted to a Mac Powerbook in August 2006. I loved the machine with great passion after the first 2 week learning curve of trying to find all the shareware/freeware utilities (that don't really exist for mac) that I thought I needed because I always needed them on the PC, only to realize that all the functionality is built into the operating system.

13 months (1 month out of warranty) later, my hard drive crashed a horrible death. What's worse, is that I had a 250GB external firewire drive sitting next to the laptop on the table and had only made a full backup, when I first got the external drive.

I lost tons of time consuming graphic design and video editing work, plus lots of PHP code from the prior 3 months where I was doing an excessive amount of work. I was devastated.

I replaced the drive, took the disk to a "lab" that was unable to get anything off of the old drive. I had used this machine quite alot and bumped it around, so I wasn't so surprised that it had gone.

15 months later, this happened again. I had made backups a couple of different times to the external drive, so the loss wasn't so bad, but I still lost quite a bit of stuff for a 6 months period (some small graphic design jobs), and Inbox/Sent mail which I hadn't backed up. This time it wasn't that bad, because I was doing alot of Lotus Notes/Domino work at the office on a PC, and not so much personal freelance work on the mac.

It was very frustrating for this to have happened a second time.

I also have to say that this has made my love for mac and apple lose alot of luster.

The second time, again, I was not able to recover any data.

The guy at the apple authorized repair shop/dealer sold me a hitachi drive this time, so hopefully things will go better.

The worst part about all of this, is that there was no warning AT ALL. No clicking drive heads, nothing.

Posted by David Killingsworth At 05:27:01 AM On 04/09/2008 | - Website - |

7 - Rob,

can you share which surface test SW you use? I'm suspecting my Air is having similar problems and would like to test the HDD, but don't know how.

Thanks!

Posted by Matjaz Slak At 09:07:31 AM On 06/18/2008 | - Website - |