The Macintosh HD gives up the ghost

Posted on: 9 January 2010

At barely a year old, the hard drive in my Macbook has failed. Sad day, yes. The good news is I have been backing up via the seamless software Time Machine. Bad news is that despite my efforts to back up over the last fortnight, my last successful backup was back in October. So that's bye-bye photos for the last 3 months, bye bye music & bye bye web stuffs.

This does, amongst other things, halt the development of design version 2 of the blog. Fortunately about 90% of the files I've been working on for the new design are backed up online, safe (touch wood) on a server somewhere in the states.

It could've been a lot worse so I'm not gonna dwell on it, I just wish I'd backed up a few more of my photos, because unlike music, they're relatively irreplaceable.

I should get my Macbook back sometime next week. It currently resides in the storeroom of the Cambridge Apple Shop. I've heard they don't let you keep the old hard drive - can anyone vouch for that? But, allas, for now I'm stuck with my old broken Dell Inspiron laptop of yesteryear, whose touchpad & keyboard has some annoying quirks I'm quickly rediscovering.

The small something I can take from this is it has reinstated my confidence in Apple software. My Mac had been running very sluggishly the last few days and as you do, you end up blaming the software. But now that I know it was a hardware fault, I'm not running with my tail between my legs back to the Windows world just yet. With that said, a hard drive failing after a year doesn't say a whole lot for Apple's quality control, build quality or testing. I can't say I've had that with any of my previous computers.

Today's advice - you can't backup too often.