Nude Photo Pro

Anybody who has read this blog previously will know that I recently upgraded to snow leopard here on my main computer and everything seemed to be going pretty well for a few days but then I had a couple of crashes and freezing episodes immediately after updating to 10.6.1.

At the time I was convinced this was most likely owed to that update and figured Apple had messed up somehow. It all went from bad to worse and eventually I was forced to re-install the operating system going back to 10.6.

That seemed to cure matters for about half a day until I ran my normal daily backup using SuperDuper! and suddenly it froze again. No amount of force quitting on my part would get out of this and although I didn’t know it at the time, this was actually my hard drive that was starting fail…

I have always had some software installed to send a warning if there was any change in the SMART status for the drive and all appeared well, so I continued to troubleshoot for longer than normal, since I was reluctant to lose my computer for a few days in a repair shop to possibly address a hardware problem that didn’t even exist.

In the past I had always believed that if a hard drive was about to fail it would be likely to happen in the space of an hour or so and that clicking sounds would normally be heard. In this case it dragged on over about a week with no odd sounds and nothing but erratic and unstable performance that mirrored the kind of result you would normally see with serious software issues.

After exhausting every possible test I came to the conclusion that it must be the hard drive or perhaps some kind of connection, so it was sent to a Mac repair specialist and to his credit he did the job in just a few hours. On another Mac I could have changed it myself in seconds, but the iMac is a tricky beast in this sense, so it’s best left to a professional.

Everything is back up and running smoothly now, but this episode has proven once again that you must keep backups or risk losing everything. In theory I could have simply re-installed the system through SuperDuper! however, given the crashes I had suffered with that external drive connected during the copy phase I was reluctant to go this route because of a risk that the data may be corrupted. On a side note I have to give full marks to Dave Nanian at SuperDuper! for his excellent support and knowledge in helping with all of this. I can think of no software company that provides better support to its customers.

I also use Time Machine and for the same reasons, I was reluctant to perform a one stop return to my previous state in case further issues emerged and it was here that I discovered a curious oddity about Time Machine…

When you install a new hard drive and go to look in your Time Machine folders on your external drive all the data is invisible! it hasn’t gone but with a fresh installation on a new drive you appear as a different user and Time Machine won’t play ball. To get around this I had to boot up from the external drive and drag various items across one by one to the new drive.

In the end it took me about a day to get everything sorted, however, I now have a much leaner machine with no legacy coding from the old system. This is now faster and more stable than I have ever experienced. Once I am 110% certain that everything I need (but nothing more) has been properly copied over, I shall wipe that external drive and create a new backup through both SuperDuper! and Time Machine which happily can work together on the same drive.

For the first ten years that I worked with computers I hadn’t suffered a single hard drive failure, but now I have had four go wrong in the last 6 months, since I also lost an old LaCie, a Western Digital and a Maxtor, which were all external drives. Both the Maxtor and the Western Digital were only a few months old.

Perhaps I was very lucky for the first few years and now I’ve had a bad run, but I also have a haunting suspicion that hard drives are being built to lower quality standards than they were in the past as the manufacturers fight to push down manufacturing costs at the expense of reliability. All the more reasons to remember that you must keep backups!!

These days we simply depend on our computers far too much. I wasn’t concerned about my image archives, since they are stored on external drives, but most users will maintain their main working data such as emails, accounting and everything else on the main computer hard drive. Basically your whole working life.

For the last week I haven’t done any photography or even thought about it because when a photographer’s main computer goes wrong in 2009 their entire business comes to a crashing halt and that becomes the first priority. You may have noticed there were no blog posts for a few days!

This was all rather unfortunate timing in that it happened a few days after switching to snow leopard. Had this occurred before, I could have copied my data from the iMac over to my G5 and carried on as before with less stress, but snow leopard doesn’t work on the old G5. At some point in the near future, I may be forced to buy another Mac with an Intel processor just to ensure I don’t have that problem in future because this break down lost me a lot of precious time.

There is so much to think about with backup strategies and keeping out of trouble, but the alternative of just trusting that nothing will go wrong is a sure fire recipe for disaster. As a professional that is just not an option. Now I hope to sort out my  broadband connection by migrating to an new ISP and then hopefully I can get back to concentrating on my photography and shoot some nice images.