Leaps of faith

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Yesterday, I did two kind of scary things:

  • Sent my 30-days'-notice letter to my apartment managers.
  • Backed up my hard drive and then wiped it entirely clean preparatory to installing Panther (the new version of Mac OS X).

Both of those required a certain amount of faith that various unknown things in the future would work out right. Being me, of course, I took various precautions before doing either of them—I waited until I was pretty sure that the work on my house is going to be done fairly soon, and I made no fewer than three backups of all my important files, using three different methods.

(It should be noted that you don't actually have to wipe your disk clean to install Panther. But I've been hearing reports that a clean install (which gets rid of the old operating system files before installing the new ones, though even that doesn't require wiping the whole disk) is more likely to be problem-free than an upgrade install, and it was a good opportunity to re-partition my hard drive (effectively giving me a couple gigabytes of extra free space that I couldn't conveniently use before), which does require wiping the whole disk clean.)

So far, restoring my files seems to be going pretty well. I can even still play all my music in iTunes. It's still a little nerve-wracking, though.

3 Responses to “Leaps of faith”

  1. Nao

    Much sympathy on the 30 days’ notice letter. I think such things are scary, too.

    I hope all the contractor stuff goes well!

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  2. Will

    What were your backup methods? My only method is roughly quarterly burning to CD of my entire home directory. Panther should be arriving this week, and I think a clean install would probably be best for me, but I share your concerns.

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  3. Jed

    I generally use Retrospect Express for backup, backing up into a single big file on my 120GB external hard drive. Pros: backs up my entire disk; does incremental backups; compresses files. Cons: kind of slow and clunky, to the point that it makes me reluctant to do backups.

    My home directory is about 20GB at this point (half of that is music), so burning to CD isn’t a good option for me, unfortunately.

    This time, I did the regular incremental backup, and then I also did a full backup of the whole disk from scratch onto three 20GB Iomega Peerless portable drive cartridges. (That took a long time, partly because it turned out the version of Retrospect Express I was using wasn’t entirely compatible with Jaguar, sigh. No wonder it hasn’t worked so well this past year. But eventually I went and got the free update, and things worked better. Still took a long time, though.)

    Then I noticed that there was enough free space on my big external disk to hold full uncompressed copies of my home directory, my Applications directory, and a couple other directories. I tried dragging my home directory to the other disk in the Finder, but it told me that I didn’t have read permission for certain unspecified files. I figured I could live with that, but I was a little nervous about it. Then I found out about the OS X command-line command “ditto”, which (when used with the -rsrcFork option) makes an exact copy of an OS X directory and all subdirectories, including permissions and resource forks and so on. So I did that—it took about an hour to copy my 20GB home directory, which is about as long as it would’ve taken in the Finder, but ditto produced a slightly higher-fidelity copy (no unreadable files).

    Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized that after I wiped my disk clean, usernames and groups would be different. So as I restore stuff from the ditto backup (using ditto again, of course), I have to do a bunch of chown and chgrp. Or else (as I’ve started doing now) restoring stuff from the ditto-copy by dragging in the Finder rather than by using ditto.

    Also, I neglected to ditto-backup certain things, such as the stuff that my VPN client software installs in /etc (?) somewhere. This is unfortunate, because my company’s IT department has a firm policy of not helping people do anything with computers not owned by the company. But I think the VPN client might not run under Panther anyway, and the new built-in Panther VPN client looks like it doesn’t do everything I need, so I may just be out of luck on that.

    Btw, I poked around online for a while before installing Panther, looking for forums where people talked about problems with Panther. I heard various scary things—the idea that external Firewire drives sometimes stop working, the idea that Palm HotSync stops working, etc—but in almost all cases, there was a response saying “If you do a clean install, this problem probably won’t occur.” I ran into some weirdnesses for a while after the install (Classic not booting, disk images not unmounting), but a reboot seems to have fixed that. iSync isn’t working for me, but macosxhints seems to be suggesting that reinstalling iSync will resolve that problem. I’ll try that sometime soon.

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