Saturday, March 22, 2008

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Three days after dropping my MacBook off to a "Mac Genius" at the local Apple store, I picked up my trusty steed fortified with a fresh new hard drive. Unfortunately, it is now a completely empty hard drive, devoid of any of the pictures or files I previously had on it. To say that that smarts a little is a bit of an understatement. Every day I remember more stuff (pics, files etc.) that were on my computer that are now lost forever and it totally bums me out. Unlike the foodie pics that I lost, some of the stuff that was on there is stuff that I can never replace, either. That sucks, but life goes on. Live and learn. I can guarantee you this; that i'll be backing up my information regularly from now on. I'll probably even upload all of my pics to some online picture hosting sites in addition to keeping copies on my drive just as an additional backup.

Anyway, now that that little snag is out of the way it's back to business as usual. Time to write some posts! And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

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Friday, March 14, 2008

A minor setback...God i'm an idiot...

They say lessons are best learned the hard way. Well, i'm in the process of learning a very hard lesson...The lesson of why you should regularly backup your information on the computer you store ALL your information on....

Recently my trusty MacBook's Hardrive decided to give up the ghost for no apparent reason. My wife was using it one minute then all of a sudden got the dreaded permanent colored pinwheel and was unable to restart, logout, or do anything on the computer. She did a forced shutdown and upon restart all that comes up is a blank grey screen. No Apple logo, no spinning icon, no nothing. Dead. Tried everything I could think of to fix the problem (First aid via Disk Utility, booting up in Safe Mode, Resetting the PRAM and Power Module, etc.) and still...nothing. Made an appointment with a "Mac Genius" and of course the prognosis was that the hard drive took a dump. The good news...my comp is still under warranty so they'll fix it for free. The bad news...I never backed up any of the information on this comp since I got it in August. Ah what fun.

The only info that is on there that I "need" are the pics that I use for this blog. I have a pretty large backlog of foodie pics that I've taken that I still need to post reviews of. So, I tried using Apple's Target Disk Mode to access the information on my MacBook from a friend's MacBook Pro, but no luck. So, today I visited a data recovery place that specializes in Macs over in Santa Monica. Unfortunately, it's rediculously expensive to recover data so i guess i'm just gonna have to count the pics as a loss and use it as an excuse to revisit the places I had pics of. Luckily, there are still pics from a few places that are still on my phone since I had been kinda busy recently (read: lazy) and hadn't gotten a chance to upload them to my MacBook. It's a blessing in disguse really because they're some places that I was looking forward to reviewing like Baby Cakes Baking Company in Torrance, CA, Patisserie Chantilly in Lomita, CA, and The Spoon House in Gardena, CA. Unfortunately, it'll be a little while before i'll be able to get my MacBook back, download the pics, and write those posts so stay tuned, and sorry for the delay. I guess now i'll have to go out and buy an external drive and back up all my stuff...

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