Alternate title (and moral of the story): A good backup saves the day.When I'm not gleefully blogging for TUAW in our secret, undisclosed location (Scott's livingroom), I'm working as the "Computer Guy" for a large, Mac-friendly company (yes, I'm e entially Nick Bur ). On Sunday I received an urgent email regarding an iBook that would not boot. It held mi ion-critical files that would be needed on Monday (today). So, its owner dro ed it off to me and I checked it out.
More after the jump...
"There's one minor detail I didn't tell you over the phone," she added. "It fell out of my jeep." Indeed, there was a nice, blacktop-colored scrape on one corner of the 'Book. If my years as an IT profe ional have taught me anything, it's that computers don't like falling onto hard parking lots. They're picky like that. Anyway, I hit the power button. I could hear the hard drive whirring, but the di lay was dark. I took the keyboard off just to see if there was any damage that would be immediately obvious. I noticed that the Airport card had been partially dislodged, at an angle that would be co istent with the impact it took. So, I figured, if this thing took a whack good enough to physically move the Airport card, it's safe to a ume that some other internal co ectio may have become dislodged. There was no time for a full take-apart, so I moved on to Plan B.
Using the video adapter, I co ected the iBook to a flat panel di lay I had on my workbench, put the machine to sleep (Command-Option-Eject for 2 seconds) and woke it back up. Nothing. Remember, there are lots of files on that machine that must be retrieved, and soon. In fact, this machine is scheduled to make Powerpoint pre etatio all week. This calls for de erate measures. So, I first co ected the forlorn iBook to a 400MHZ G4 I have with a firewire cable. Next, I co ect the external HD that's used as the iBook's backup destination. Finally, I co ect another iBook to the G4 via Firewire. Next I boot both iBooks in target disk mode on the G4.
Now it's time for SuperDuper! to do its magic. If you're unfamiliar, SuperDuper! is a utility that can make bootable clones of a machine's hard drive, and update them incrementally. So, I had SuperDuper! update the damaged iBook's backup drive with its internal volume's current state (which only took a few minutes, thanks to smart backu ). Next, I told SuperDuper! to clone the now up-to-date external drive to the 2nd iBook's hard drive, which is just like physically moving the drive, but without all the me . A short time later (all right, a long time, but I was at work, so it's OK), the working iBook had been turned into a mirror image of its damaged counterpart, all of the important files had been saved (the iBook is off presenting slides as I type this, in fact), the user experienced only an afternoon of turn around and today I can get to work on properly diagnosing the damaged iBook with a lot le pre ure than I had on myself yesterday.
The moral of the story is this: Things ha en. Back up your stuff. Go to your local geek store this weekend and buy an external hard drive. Because pavement i 't very forgiving.
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