The big purge

Posted on July 21, 2006

Following the unrecoverable crash of Lemming’s (my iBook) hardrive and it’s replacement, I now have a 4-year old iBook G3 900MHz with t 80G hard-drive. Not bad he?

Of course this forced upgrade comes in a specially bad time when I am anticipating the second generation of the MacBook line in order to get me one of the 13’ ones but then, when is an hardware failure of this magnitude ever convenient?

Replacing the drive was especially fun (not!) and it shows the computer’s age and the prowess of Apple’s engineers that they could stuff all those components (which weren’t as miniaturized as they are now, not by a long shot) inside such a small space and still make the laptop as sturdy as it is!

Anyway, the really hard part os all if this was loosing data. Yes, I know I should backup everything important very often. I know it should be done religiously and without fail. I know. I don’t do it.

In the end I could recover most of my stuff from old backups and replication points here and there but not all of it. I made the bed, I’ll lay on it.

Especially funny was the way I recovered all my contact and calendar data. I simply synched and merged everything I had on my cell phone and my Palm. So now I have lots of duplicates and I lost some info (the Mac apps keep a lot more information that any of these devices) but I still have an (old) copy of the info on another Mac so I’ll probably be able to complement it pretty well and loose only a small portion of the data in the end.

So maybe now I’ll do something to the effect of ticking the “Buy Backup External Hard-drive” item off my to-do list…

But not all of it was bad, I lost my recent RSS subscriptions and after dropping the ones I had dropped already along the way I got to a decent number of feeds again so this purge may not have been all that bad… Plus, you can’t beat the feeling of a fresh install. Pure joy!

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