Yesterday the hard drive in my laptop failed. I knew that it was coming, as my computer was making a lot of noise and would slow to a halt. With hindsight being what it is, I know I should have taken care of the problem when the noise started happening.
Since I needed to get a new drive, I decided to get the largest one that I could. I got a 100 GB drive for $179 at Fry’s Electronics. I spent a lot of time last night attempting to recover the data from the bad drive. Since the drive was still readable, I was hoping that I would be able to copy all of the data off the drive onto the new one.
I gave up after several hours, since the drive failure was causing access on that drive to slow to a crawl. I attempted to use diskutil in single user mode. I decided to reinstall OS X from scratch, then I restored from the backup that I made last week. (I had made the backup using Apple’s Backup software. I actually had not continued my .Mac subscription, but Backup was still working. In order for me to restore, I had to sign up for a free 60 day trial of .Mac.)
I had backed up all of my important documents, but I missed some files that caused me a little headache.
- .bashrc file
- .ssh directory – so I lost my ssl private keys (luckily I did not change my servers to accept public key logins only)
- ~/Library/Application Support/ directory. – I lost my Firefox bookmarks
- ~/bin – I lost some scripts that I had written
But honestly I am glad that I did the backup that was just a few days old.
