Andrew & Cristina

It’s been a while since I last wrote something and I have absolutely no excuse for the past two weeks. What I have is an excuse for yesterday, if that counts. My laptop’s hard drive played some tricks on me yesterday and I spend the day (and night) troubleshooting, backing up, doing a fresh OS install, and restoring files. At first I thought we’d left the restore disks at home in the US, but thankfully I had the foresight to bring them along.

Try to imagine my panic during the few minutes when I envisioned those darned disks sitting on my desk at home. Then imagine my panic when the disk utility reported that it could not repair the file structure. It said something about an invalid sibling link but I was in no mood to read about what that meant. All I could see was myself sitting at home on a dinky little island with nothing to do but flip through the 15 or so decent TV channels we get. The horror! My files, my emails, my photos, my music, my ebooks, my recipes. All gone. I foolishly had not been backing up as frequently as I should have.

At the time it seemed like a good idea to spend the money on Disk Warrior to get it to simply restore the hard drive to its original state. Anything to not have to go through the agony of reinstalling the OS and possibly losing all my files. Silly me. Disk Warrior reported that the damage was too severe for a simple restore, so I had to go about it the hard way. Archive and install did not work and my only viable option was to erase and install.

Fast forward twelve hours, few of which were spent snoozing, and I’m back up and running. The catch is that I have to install a massive system update, which is taking eons to download on our blazing fast connection. The moral of the story: backup, backup, backup!