Crisis!

[triskellian]

Last night, after an enjoyable evening watching Dangerous Liasons with leathellin and metame (I've seen it lots of times, and I was still laughing almost all the way through. Next time someone asks one of those favourite film questions, remind me that DL deserves a place on the longlist?), I was checking LJ and Patchwork before bed, when my puter suddenly became as dead as a dead thing. Checked the battery - more than a quarter charged. Tried to turn it on - nothing. Left it overnight - nothing, although it was still warm. Argh!

I did buy the extended guarantee, so it's not a complete catastrophe, but assuming it doesn't spontaneously start working again this evening, it'll mean being without my beloved puter for some time while it's fixed/replaced. And part of my mind is occupied in trying to decide whether I'd prefer it to be fixed (leaving my data, settings and apps intact) or replaced (losing the aforementioned, but getting both a hardware and an OS upgrade)...

No. I'm mourning, not coveting. Honest.

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Could you switch the old hard drive into a new machine?

[metame.livejournal.com]

eeep!

[triskellian]

Mac laptop, so no, not easily :-( I do have a recent data backup, so that's not too bad, but reaquiring/installing all my apps would take ages.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Oh nooo !

Serves as a warning to the rest of us, though: Don't leave vital data on a laptop. </hypocrite>

[lathany.livejournal.com]

Did you let Ryan near it?!

More seriously - I hope it's not unfixable.

[triskellian]

I haven't deliberately let Ryan near it, but he will keep sneaking into our house when we're asleep and trying to break all of our tech. I block up the holes as soon as I find them, but he keeps making/finding new ones. I assume you'll be happy to receive my bill for the inconvenience of being without my puter?

;-)

[chrisvenus]

Have you tried unplugging it from the mains and removing all batteries for a while? If its still warm in the morning that implies to me that it was still on and doing stuff. Because all the power switches are (I'm guessing) soft and thus require the computer to be working in some way it may be that you trying to turn it off and on just didn't work. Removing all power sources is the "nuke it from orbit" way of turning it off and might do the trick. At least I ahd a laptop that did similar things once and it worked for that. Worth a try.

[frax.livejournal.com]

Although thanks to cardinalsin and truemortality my puter and data now seem to have been saved.

As it turned out I had the bloodhound virus which is now disposed of and I don't think I infected anyone else.

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

Eeerk.

Frightening.... I *didn't* get the extended warranty.

[dr-bob.livejournal.com]

If you do get a new pooter, and can access the HD of the old machine, then you can clone the old hard drive onto the new one. Then you can upgrade the OS (with the shiny new pooter's disks). I just did that for my computer's new hard drive. It's sweet. Obviously this assumes your problem is a hardware (non HD) one. Drop me a line if you want instructions.

[uitlander]

Could you get someone to 'ghost' the HDD before it goes back to Apple? That way you could recover everything if they replace it.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

If the laptop is as nadgered as described, then ghosting the drive wouldn't be any easier than moving it to another machine. Because, in particular, you'd have to move it to another machine in order to ghost it...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

You mean, your data backup doesn't include all the install executables for the applications you downloaded, together with all the CDs for the applications you didn't?

[triskellian]

:-P

(It's working again now, anyway. I think the battery wasn't refitted properly after I took it out at the weekend.)

[uitlander]

Well yes, I was assuming it would have to be connected to another machine - but of she wants her data and apps intact...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

if she wants her data and apps intact...

... she should do daily backups?

[spyinthehaus.livejournal.com]

No extended warranty here, either. I like to live dangerously, clearly. I know that feeling of simultaneous relief that your laptop is working again and disappointment that you won't get a new one - although in my case it then died again annd replacing it cost me a grand because the warrantor had gone bust. I'm not sure there's a moral there, unless it's "never take advice from spyinthehaus"...

[uitlander]

Well, that would help for next time, wouldn't it? And of course being a gentleman you'll be setting up a nice cron job to do just that for her in future, won't you sweetie ;-)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't use a chron job, you might not want it going off while you're working, or while you're not connected to the network (such that the backups can't be taken off the machine). Better to kick it off by hand before putting the pooter to bed for the night, I'd say.

I'm happy to share my own backup script with anyone who wants it - you need make, bash, find, zip and (optionally) gpg (so that I can send an encrypted backup to work for off-site storage). I'd have thought that all of those are either in MacOS already or easily available. It's not really a complete "backup solution", because I had some trouble with it thinking that certain file types had changed when really they hadn't - possibly something wrong with "find" on Windows - and the upshot is that I changed the incremental backup to only register changed (and new) files, not old files which have been moved into a back-up-able region. Increments also doesn't back up the fact that a file has been deleted, so a restore could re-create such files.

So for someone not willing to pay attention to what it's doing, it'd be better to go with an off-the-shelf solution than to take mine. I think triskellian's up to it.