However, in this instance, Disk Utility wasn't that keen to do it mainly because the small amount of free space was so fragmented. So I updated my two TimeMachine backups and then ran Drive Genius 2 which seemed quite happy to defragment the drive. I left it running overnight.
In the morning the Mac had an error on the screen telling me the main hard drive was damaged! Looks like Drive Genius wasn't that great after all, it would have been nice if it had flagged up that there might be a problem.
Thank goodness that I had followed my own preaching and used TimeMachine to look after my backups. I had taken the precaution of using two different TimeMachine backups to two different drives, so that if one drive were to fail at any time I would have another backup.
I use DropBox to sync important data between my Macs, so I know all the data there was safe—Dropbox data also gets backed up by TimeMachine, which makes it better than iDisk. Its data is also both remote and local, rather than being online only.
Slightly nervous time while I waited for the restore to take place.
Everything (though see newer post) arrived back just as it had been before yesterday's calamity. I dread to think where I would have even started to try and get all the data back. Lots of it had no great value but interspersed among all the bits and pieces were a variety of important documents which I could really do with keeping!
Read more: Why should I bother backing up?
Read more: Why should I bother backing up?
Hmmm... interesting post. I had a similar problem with Drive Genius and gave up using it - or at least, gave up using its defrag option. I just tend to rebuild volumes in Disk Warrior and it does the job for me. But...
ReplyDeleteThe 10 month old 250Gb Hitachi travelstar in my Macbook failed recently and I have, annoyingly, lost a few files. Trouble is, it's easy to not bother to backup laptops, especially when you have not that long ago fitted a new drive. Yes I should have a network attached time machine backup. Your scheme of sharing via Dropbox is such an obvious one, I don't know why I've not done it! My drop box is full of other people's stuff - and not enough of my own!