The lesson that keeping up-to-date backups of all of your files can save your bacon came through for me today. I was at work this morning, taking notes during a meeting on my MacBook Pro, when the battery ran completely out of juice in about 45 minutes, forcing me to shut the lid and work on paper until my meeting was done. When I plugged in the machine back in my office, things weren't working right. So, I started shutting down applications before rebooting the machine, in hopes that a fresh restart after the machine had been running for 10 straight days would help cure whatever was wrong.
Everything went well for a while, until I tried to quit Tinderbox. The program simply would not quit. It wouldn't even respond to force quitting. And so, since the machine was unresponsive, I opted to force a reboot. Bad move. When the machine rebooted everything was working except the two Tinderbox files that were running when my I did a forced reboot.
So, I lived without Tinderbox for the day. Once I was home, I hooked my machine up to the external hard drive that I back up to each night using SuperDuper over a wireless network connection. It took a little while to open the sparse disk image that I back up to, but once it finished opening I double-checked that I could open the file with Tinderbox, then I dragged yesterday's copy to my MacBook Pro and I was back in business. The last step was to re-create one post to Mac Net Journal that I had made last night, after my daily backup, and everything was back up and running as if nothing had happened.
As it turns out, the only data I lost from the crash was the notes I was taking in Tinderbox when my machine locked up. No problem. I'm back in business and happy to know that the very basic daily backup system I use, which runs automatically every night as long as I have my MacBook Pro running within range of my Airport base station. It's backing up again right now. It's a good thing...
