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Mac Corner: Physician heal thyself (redux)

  
By Larry Grinnell, Palm Beach Phoenix Apple Users Group

larry grinnellYou’d think I’d learned my lesson about backing up critical data, but nope, not me. In an extreme case of overconfidence and hubris, I let a Mac mini that I had set up in my house as a webserver for a genealogically oriented family association go without a full backup … for almost seven years! Yeah, yeah … I had planned on doing something when I had a little free time on my hands, but that time never came.

This server was running several specialized web applications, including the complete genealogy of the Grinnell family, configured in such a fashion that it is very difficult to start over from scratch. Oh, and did I mention the main membership database? Yup. Also gone. At least for that one, I think I’ve got a backup of that file somewhere, and because it’s membership renewal time, the membership chair had just made printouts of critical member information. Not that this should in anyway excuse what has happened.

Last Thursday, I got an email from the association president (I am the secretary and webmaster) noting the difficulty they were having in accessing the website. When I got home from work, I confirmed the problem and decided to start with the usual method of fixing things like this — reboot the server. Well, that’s where things got REALLY interesting/bad.

When I rebooted, I got a blank screen for about three minutes, followed by an alternating blank folder icon and a Mac OS X icon. I tried inserting a diagnostic CD, and it wouldn’t mount. Now, it’s won’t even eject!

That may actually be good news. If there’s a hardware problem (something on the computer itself and not the hard disk drive), I may be able to put the drive into another similar vintage 1.25GHz G4 Mac mini (many to choose from on Ebay) and resume operations as if nothing went wrong.

If it’s the drive, my only hope is that I can pull the drive from the current Mac mini, connect it to a special adapter cable, and attempt to run some very sophisticated data recovery tools (Prosoft Data Rescue) to get the data onto another drive.

So, in preparation, I made a trip to my friendly neighborhood CompUSA store and picked up a new 80GB IDE hard drive (very inexpensive for one of these older model Macs), and a USB-to-hard-drive adapter cable. The goal is to try to recover directly to this new drive, which, as I said, would replace the drive currently installed inside this Mac mini.

Next, if I can indeed recover the data, I will pull one of my older external hard drives out of its current service, and do a full copy of this recovered data to the external drive using a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, both of which are free, and which create bootable backups. This means that if the internal drive fails again, I can immediately switch over to the external, boot from it, and only lose whatever data may have been added since the previous backup.

I won’t know how much damage has occurred for a few more days, but suffice it to say, I have let down the organization I have been supporting with my technical expertise for over 20 years, and if things have gone as bad as I think they may have, I may have lost at least 6-9 months of data entry work performed by our genealogy committee chairperson in preparation for my task of writing and editing the next edition of the Grinnell family genealogy, not to mention the entire website content, and the membership database. Here’s hoping it won’t come to that.

So, what have we learned here? First and foremost, make sure your data is backed up regularly, and if it absolutely, positively has to be available 24/7, make sure you have created at least one, and maybe even two bootable backups of your work. Next, if the data is that critical, get it off your little computer at home, and if you are using software that permits it, port it to a hosted service, though even there, no matter whether they do regular backups or not, do your own backup of your critical data often. Ultimately, if you are the caretaker of the data, it’s your responsibility to ensure that it remains available to those who need it, when they need it.

This is has been a very painful exercise in poor judgment that could easily have been avoided, and it could have all been done automatically with a few simple scripts.

Excuse me while I flog myself a little more before bedtime.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Readers are welcome to comment on this or any Mac Corner columns by visiting the Palm Beach Phoenix blog as well as by writing the editor of Palm Beach Business.com.

Mac Corner runs every Wednesday only in Palm Beach Business.com. Click to read the previous column.

About Larry Grinnell: Larry has been working with Macintosh and Windows PCs for over 25 years and worked as a senior technical writer and IT support professional for a major midwest-based consumer electronics and telecommunications equipment manufacturer here in South Florida. His musings on a wide variety of topics from computers to jazz guitar to strange foreign cars from the 1950s can be viewed at the MyMac.com website. Click here to reach him by email.

palm beach phoenix logoWriters of this column are members of the Palm Beach Phoenix Apple User Group, a nonprofit organization for Apple Computing Device Users, recognized by Apple Inc., with the purpose of providing educational training and coaching to its members (students, professionals and seniors alike) in a cordial social environment. The club meets the second Saturday (1-4 p.m.) and fourth Wednesday (6-8 p.m.) of each month at the Fire Station #2, 4301 Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach (just two block south of Southern Boulevard). Click here to visit their website. Click here to reach them by email.

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