mike’s place

Have you ever had one of those moments? You know the moment when you realize that something really bad â„¢ has happened. I had one of those a few hours ago. A gut wrenching realization that over 10 years of data has found its way to /dev/null.

As of today, my email history goes back a grand total of 4 days. Yes, you read that right. No, that’s not a typo. My address book has a grand total of one entry (i.e. mine). My Yojimbo database is gonzo. Anything and everything that wasn’t in my $HOME/data and $HOME/data2 directories is gone. That includes all of the Application data that’s stored in $HOME/Library/. I’ve fumed over that practice in the past, but it has new meaning to me today. Also lost is all of my application preferences — and I have, errr had, lots of applications installed. So the next several weeks of my life will be spent ‘rebuilding my digital life’. Sigh.

Gigabytes and gigabytes of data. Down. The. Tube. Oh the horror.

And you know what? I’m not angry. I’m not upset. I do, however, have a bit of a hole in the middle of my body at the moment. You know, where my stomach used to be. It’s beginning to sink in. I’m still not sure of the full extent of what I’ve lost, but I’m sure that over the next few days, weeks, and months, I’ll realize that, “Oh cr@p! I’ve lost that data as well.”

This sad tale began last night. My system began acting very strange. I’d seen that kind of strange before. The kind of strange that likely means that a rebuild of my system disk would soon be in order. It’s something that I’ve done a few times before. I always have a few copies of my ‘data’ directories in various other locations — my local server, my PowerBook, Strongspace, etc. In general my backup procedure is to backup my data directories in one backup, and the rest of my $HOME directory in another backup set. Just to be sure that I had the most up-to-date data, I went down into the basement and pulled the ’spare’ external firewire drive off of my server and hooked it up to my workstation. I formated the drive and started to make fresh copies of my data directories. My workstation limped along, but it eventually completed the backups. The other complication is that a few months ago I had changed my disk layout to retain my $HOME directory on the system disk and my data directories on another disk with symlinks to the data directories. This was a change of my usual practice of keeping my system disk strictly for the system, and my $HOME completely on a separate drive. What happened last night and today is that I forgot what the data layout of my workstation actually was.

You may have already guessed that the ’spare’ drive wasn’t the spare drive at all, but it was in fact the drive with the previous night’s backup of my $HOME direcotory. So instead of having two copies of my $HOME directory, I ended up with zero. Hence the big hole where my stomach used to be.

So here’s to a fresh start. And the next several weeks of slowly getting my (computer) life back in order. It’s actually somewhat cathartic.

Addendum: As I start to re-install applications and set up their preferences, I am becoming overwhelmed with the scope of the work involved. When I said earlier that I have a lot of applications, I wasn’t kidding. Not only do I have to set up all of my preferences again (on all of those apps), but I have to try to remember all of those preferences. Built. Up. Over. Several. Years. All while trying to work on client projects. Yikes!

Addendum #2: Ack! Add my Calendar to the list! Arrgggghhhhhh! All of those reminder, todos, etc. Whoa! Oh, my life is going to be so interesting over the next little (hopefully) while.