Thank you, Time Machine
I once read a Slashdot comment in which it was claimed that programming is the closest thing to magic our society has ever encountered:
What is magic? Words and symbols of power that shape the world according to the will of the magician. The magician speaks the right magic words, and draws the right sigils, and obtains the desired effect.
…
And what is programming? Words and symbols of power that shape the computer according to the will of the programmer. Type the right instructions, give the right command arguments, and obtain the desired effect.
Ever created an infinite loop? Had a recursive process go berserk on you? Made a small mistake while invoking rm -rf? Yeah. Pure ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’.
Well, tonight I felt like an apprentice all over again. In the process of writing a shell script to do some logout cleanup, I, um, accidentally deleted everything in my home folder.
You WHAT!???????
Don’t worry much, the story has a short and happy conclusion. I popped into Time Machine and did a wireless restore from my last backup. Took about 20 minutes. Now, to be fair, any backup method would have done fine, but Time machine was particularly convenient because:
- The last backup was 15 minutes before the disaster, so most of the files I had been working on for the past few hours were relatively current.
- I didn’t have to get up off the couch in a bloody rage and go fetch and set up the backup drive, piquing the curiosity of my blissfully unaware friends having a conversation about World War II and video games in the living room.
It is for just this sort of reason that not only backup, but networked Time machine backup is so critical. Have a cloned bootable drive handy in case anything disastrous happens to the networked one, but if your important files are time-sensitive, valuable, and change on an hourly basis, you need to be backing up using Time Machine over a network.
Categorised as: Backup