For the second time in a week; my Macbook up and decided to hide all my files. After spending most of last Sunday repairing its first aneurysm, I thought I had narrowly made it out of the woods. Then, on an otherwise mellow Saturday afternoon, it rebooted for a system update and undid all my work!
Fortunately, the data wasn’t gone, just trapped once again it a hidden, encrypted sparseimage file FileVault that was no longer associated with any of the accounts on the machine. Not wanting to take any more chances, I waited until the next morning to pick up an external drive to make a full copy of the file before doing anything else. (The intervening hours also included Bob’s bachelor party and a nice Sunday-morning hangover.) External drive sizes and prices continue to impress me; my Macbook and iTunes-only Windows PC each have 80 GB drives; for $135 I got a 320 GB external USB/Firewire drive, and the terabyte ones weren’t all that expensive. (Firewire turned out to be a bit of a waste; my Macbook and most of the drives only do 400 MB/s Firewire vs USB 2.0’s 480 MB/s. Those numbers, in turn, are nowhere near the real-world rate of 25 MB/s or less I actually experienced.)
One disappointment with the drive was it’s default FAT32 formatting; a good choice for compatibility, but not if you want to copy files over 4 GB or preserve Mac’s Unixy permission schemes. Formatting a drive is one area where Steve Jobs and company missed the mark; it’s easy enough to partition a drive in Disk Utility, but to format it, you have to “erase” it, which is less than intuitive.
Once the drive was split and formatting into Mac and PC halves, I was finally able to make a backup copy of the 43 GB sparseimage file as well as export the 13 GB of regular files within it. (I suppose I should let the disk compression routine run when rebooting once in a while.)
The next step was to remove all the offending user accounts, leaving just a generic admin one. After rebooting to make sure the changes wouldn’t be mysteriously reversed, I created a new user account, FileVaulted the fresh home drive, and copied the exported regular files into it. Hidden files required a second pass, and I had to rebuild several email folders to reflect all the messages they contained.
I suppose this calls for a revision in my backup strategy as well; though I was able to recover all my data, it would’ve been much easier just to take the nuclear option and restore from a complete image of the drive, which I now certainly have the storage space to do.
del.icio.us/mbotos
