The Time Machine: A Tale of Woe and Rejoicing

Friday night as I was using my laptop, (an Apple MacBook running OS X 10.5, thank you very much,) the hard drive died on me. This was rather unfortunate as I was hoping to use it in my preparations for finals week. I took it in to the Apple store down at the Gateway Mall in Salt Lake City, figuring that if any place would have a replacement hard drive for me, they would.

Unfortunately, while my laptop is still under warranty and the replacement could take place free of charge, the shop didn't have any hard drives of the correct variety in stock. So on Saturday night I traded my laptop for a piece of paper and came back home lamenting my loss. (Well, really, I drove four blocks to the Church Office Building parking lot in 45 minutes, got there too late to get our actual seats, watched the Mormon Tabernacle Choir concert with Dragon Lady from one of the side rooms used by the ushers, got free pink lemonade out of it, sat in the parking lot for 45 minutes before we moved on our way out, and THEN came back home lamenting my loss. But that's another story.)

In the meantime, I've been using a Windows desktop machine that I picked up early this year in exchange for some help to my cousins. When I got the computer, though, I only got the actual computer. No monitor, no keyboard, no mouse. I had an external monitor which I planned on using, but I still needed the keyboard and mouse. So I made the wise decision to purchase the cheapest keyboard/mouse combo I could find. I didn't realize just how low-quality the keyboard is until I was forced to use it exclusively; both Dragon Lady and Katya can testify that I was having extreme difficulties typing earlier today. (I'm typing this blog post using the cheap keyboard; I was actually hoping that it would start dropping letters so you could see what I'm talking about, but alas, it seems to be working better at the moment. I briefly considered retyping the entire blog post in hopes that it would start acting up, but my wiser half has informed me that this would be a terrible use of time with a 7:00 AM final pending tomorrow morning.)

The Apple technician told me that the hard drive would probably take 3 days to arrive. He told me this at about 6:30 PM on Saturday night, and I was left wondering exactly what three days meant. Saturday to Sunday, Monday, Tuesday? Was it too late to count Saturday, so we'd go Sunday to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? Did Sunday not count in such calculations, meaning that the order would go through on Monday and I'd receive it three days later on Thursday? As I had a presentation on Wednesday for which I strongly wanted my laptop, things weren't looking too good for me.

Happily, though, at 3:30 PM today I received a call informing me that my new hard drive had been installed and was ready to go. I called my dad who works up in Salt Lake and asked if he'd pick it up on his way home. He kindly obliged, and after an exchange in an Orem 7-11 parking lot earlier tonight, my laptop is back in my hands. (For those who I know will appreciate this, when I walked into my apartment with my newly received laptop, I immediately held it high above my head with both hands and proudly sang the "You Opened a Treasure Box!" theme from Zelda.)

Of course, the problem with having your hard drive replaced is that your data tends to depart with the old one. And this is the part where I bless Apple's name to my dying breath. With this latest version of OS X, (called Leopard,) Apple included an automated backup solution called Time Machine. When I plugged in my external hard drive, (thanks to Dragon Lady and her brother for picking it up for me,) I was asked if I'd like to use that drive for my backups. I said Yes, and after that point, the only thing I've had to do was make sure to connect my external hard drive when I've been at home. When I received my laptop back today, I simply booted from the OS X installation disk and selected "Restore System from Backup" from the drop-down menu. Leopard found the backup drive, listed the date and time of each of my backups, and is now copying all the files back to my computer.

You'll note that I said nothing about deciding which files to back up or deciding at what time the backup should run, or making sure that I was connected when that time came around, or being unable to use my computer during that backup time. That's because none of these applied to me in the least. (Okay, you can tell it not to back up certain directories, but the default is to back up all the non-volatile data on your hard drive, so it's not a concern.) I simply plugged it in, said "Yes", and now my data is all being restored exactly as I left it.

Bless you, Apple. And your little dog, too.