In the middle of this play, a villain enters center stage, bringing the action to a halt, blocking all exits, erasing the past.
Yes, friends, my hard drive crashed. Naturally, I'm a very good girl and thus use Time Machine on my MacBook Pro, which means I never have to think about backups.
They
just
happen.
So data recovery, complete restoration of my new hard drive (320 GB for $99 - who can believe this), should not be a problem, right?
Granted, when I took off for New York, I didn't pack my external hard drive, which means I've lost the past month or so of work, but, hey, my clients and colleagues are the understanding sort, who indulge my situation and will send me back anything I need until I can plug in that drive, hit "restore" in Time Machine, and life is back to perfection.
WARNING MAC USERS: If the name of your machine carries any non-alphanumeric characters, you cannot retrieve your data from your backup drive. Although it appears that Time Machine is working - it spins every hour (my setting for backup) - there is absolutely nothing available for restoration. I'm not kidding. The link earlier in this graf goes to Apple's purported fix for this with an update to OSX 10.5.2. Of course, I can't be sure of this but I believe I was running OSX 10.5.2.
In any event, if you're running earlier versions of Leopard, you probably are vulnerable to this kind of devastating loss too.
My crashed drive has now gone to the ICU (supposedly the premier data recovery shop for Macs) and I think I'm facing a rather large repair, providing they can do it.
Wish me luck. If I had more time, I'd detail the House of Horrors that I've been through with this but with my person in the hospital, I'm keeping a positive attitude, right?
Yes, positive attitude. The balm for bombs.
And, oh, Apple. Shame on you. There should have been a warning, a very clear warning, that this could happen. No error message. Very poor on the part of the company I've been a customer of for 25 years.
