Saved by SuperDuper: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-22-08

This week’s (very late) backup reminder is one for the Mac users. It comes from Dave, the founder of EAR/Rational Music. Dave also writes his own Music Blog.

I’m a SOHO owner and Mac user and I was saved by SuperDuper!, disk cloning software made by Shirt Pocket Software. (Not affiliated with them other than being a satisfied customer.) I have a separate building on my property from which I run the business. I use a small space heater in winter and a portable swamp cooler in the summer. As you might imagine, the barn, as I call it, isn’t exactly “climate controlled.” At the time of this story, I was using an eMac, an all-in-one computer which served me well. One Sunday afternoon in April, I went out there and found the computer off. I assumed we’d lost power, which happens occasionally, but to my chagrin I found that I was unable to boot the computer at all. The screen showed a flashing question-mark icon, which means the computer could not find a disk to boot from.

I have a 300GB external hard drive that I use for backups, and I keep it in the house, rather than in the barn, for two reasons. First off, the house is climate controlled, so the drive won’t be affected by extreme temperatures. Second, if there is a fire or other damage to the barn, the external drive will likely be protected in the house. Of course a hard drive isn’t a perfect backup solution, since it could fail, but it’s unlikely that both drives will fail at the same time, especially if the backup drive is unplugged when not in use.

After retrieving the drive from the house, I plugged it into the FireWire port of the eMac, and rebooted. Since this drive contained a clone of the internal hard drive of the eMac, I was up and running in 5 minutes. As it turned out, the clone had been made about a month prior to this incident, so not all files were up to date, but the one file I really needed, the data file for my invoicing/accounting program, had actually been copied to my wife’s laptop earlier in the day. At the time I did not have a laptop, and I would copy this file to my wife’s laptop when I wanted to work in the house instead of in the barn.

So the bottom line is that I was lucky. SuperDuper! got me most of the way there (and indeed, would have gotten my farther had I run it more often), and dumb luck got me the rest of the way. It turns out the hard drive in the eMac was completely fried, and not even visible to any recovery software. With a bit of work, I was able to install a new hard drive about a month later (as I said, it’s an all-in-one machine, and as such, it isn’t made to be upgraded), but prior to doing that, I was able to run just fine from the external drive.

Thanks to Dave for reminding us that the hard drive on a Mac is just as likely to fail as the hard drive on a Windows machine—and to his wife for letting him copy his financial data to her laptop.