Last week my Macbook froze, and I mean really froze. The kind of crash that requires you to unplug the power and pop the battery out. Unfortunately with the frozen computer resolved I was faced with a new problem – when rebooting the system displayed the dreaded blinking question mark folder. A call to Apple Care (yes I bought the warranty) confirmed what Google had already told me – that this hard drive was dead.
As an aside, this is apparently some sort of know massive manufacturing defect affecting a significant amount of the OEM drives for Apple.
The Apple Care agent was a riot. The quote was something like, “well I’ve only heard of one or two systems coming back from this error”. Kudos to Apple for having the telephone support center in Indiana (as in the State of Indiana). Unfortunately this is where my praise for Apple support ends. My option was either to ship my Laptop to some unknown place or go to an Apple store for a repair. The agent offered to make me an appointment (a two day wait would be the earliest available) I declined and opted to try my luck as a walk in.
The Genius Bar was a mob scene – you wouldn’t believe how many people were waiting to be taught how to use their iPhone. The Concierge confirmed that it was a two day wait for an appointment and went on to elaborate that it would take an additional one to two days to replace the hard drive from that point. After rolling my eyes and expressing my dismay (I think my exact quote was “two days to replace a hard drive”) I opted for plan B.
Plan B in this case was the purchase of a nice shiny new laptop hard drive from the local MacMall. I’m sure I could have saved a couple bucks online but there is nothing quite like instant gratification. The hard drive access was very convenient and all in all took maybe five minutes to swap out. What I am most impressed with is Time Machine.
Apple really knocked it out of the park with Time Machine, I’d go as far as saying it is one of the most important applications developed by Apple. Why? Quite simply because it is the first backup application I have seen targeted to the consumer that works flawlessly – simple to version, simple to go back in time to a previous backup, simple to restore a file/directory, and simple to restore the entire system. If you are using a Mac and are not backing it up – you deserve to lose all of your data.
Yeah, Time Machine is awesome! Sure, it’s not perfect – but it is supremely easy – in the “people will actually use this”. We bought a Time Capsule at home and in the office I setup the other guys laptops to backup to an old G4 PowerMac running OS X server (that’s otherwise just our calendar server…).
I got my mother setup with a USB drive to backup to – in the past the backups would happen when I talked to her and walked her through starting SuperDuper. Now she knows just to plug it in for the afternoon a few times a week and it works Like Magic.
I’d still recommend doing an occasional SuperDuper clone though; if nothing else then just as a way to have an extra copy. Harddrives are so crazy cheap now.
- ask