What to do when your Macbook Hard Disk dies?

Ok, so the worst happened… the internal disk in my Macbook went belly-up with no warning or fanfare at all. Fortunately, I was prepared. Here’s how I was able to quickly get back in business with my Mac.

I was working away on my Macbook last night when suddenly the screen became unresponsive. The mouse pointer could still move about, but otherwise everything else stopped responding. Eventually, I realised this was fairly catastrophic and that I’d have to power-off to recover. So, power-off I did. And when I powered the beast back on, I heard that horrible ‘click…click…click’ sound of a disk trying to spin up - that’s when my suspicions were confirmed - my disk was history.

Backup & Recovery - 101

For the last year I have been using SuperDuper to take a complete Disk Image (or Clone) of my internal disk onto an external USB or Firewire drive. (I have two separate drives, one at work and one at home, which I alternate.) This means I always have a bootable external drive up-to-date as of the last time I ran the SuperDuper backup process. Currently I’m using Carbon Copy Cloner under Leopard as ‘Shirt Pocket’ have not released their Leopard version of SuperDuper yet.

So, I grabbed my most recent backup disk, connected it up and attempted to boot from the external drive. Interestingly, it did not (at first) want to boot, even holding down the ‘Option’ key in order to be prompted for the desired boot device. In the end I booted from my Leopard install DVD, and changed the primary boot device to the external drive, and then I was eventually able to boot from the external drive. (I guess the EFI firmware was struggling with the concept of not being able to detect an internal drive at all!)

All up, I was back running on a 1-week old copy of my disk within around 15 minutes. Not too bad, and only a minor delay in getting the rest of my work done. This ability to boot from a cloned copy means you can be back on the job quickly, and then can clean up the mess later when its more convenient.

But still, what about the missing 1 week of data and changes?

Leopard’s Time Machine

This morning I returned my Macbook to the service dept at my friendly Apple Reseller (MagnumMac), and managed to obtain an equivalent loaner while mine is repaired. Given the complaints on the web around Time Machine, I thought this would be a good opportunity to test the Time Machine restore process out myself. Along with my full-disk backups, I have also been using Leopard’s new Time Machine feature to create ‘delta’ backups on an almost daily basis. Lucky for me, my last Time Machine ‘Sync’ was earlier on yesterday - so I had a backup copy of nearly 100% of my data.

As an experiment I thought I would do a scratch install of Leopard on the loaner, and then restore from my Time Machine backup - just to see how long it would take if I was forced to do it that way. In total it took about 2 hours - 1 for the Leopard install and 1 for the Time Machine Restore - and fortunately it went flawlessly. The only settings that didn’t seem to restore were related to the different laptop’s hardware e.g. bluetooth mouse pairing. Otherwise, I had no problems at all, and was back to where I was about 12hrs before the crash.

Of course I could have just cloned my External drive back to the internal drive and done a Time Machine Restore from there, but where’s the fun in that? When I get my own machine back, I’ll do it that way - I suspect it will take about half the time.

Summary

OSX makes recovery back to a boot-able copy of a cloned drive easy. Products like SuperDuper and Carbon Copy make it very easier - and, cloned copy jobs can be scheduled so you don’t forget. Add Leopard’s new Time Machine to the picture, especially if it can eventually backup to SMB (Windows) or NFS (unix/linix) Network Shares, and you have a great solution that will work for most people. Not quite ’set & forget’… but reliable and straight forward when you really need it.