DrunkenBlog

Anthropomorphizing alcohol while pondering backups and hoping I don't have to give a friend bad news

I've been working hard on some projects, and deadlines and milestones can really take it out of your sleep schedule. I'm kind of known for pushing my sleep schedule beyond normal limits, sometimes through artificial means, and used to be quite proud of it.

As I've gotten older though, I've started to try to introduce some sanity into my schedule. While that plan gets derailed from time to time because of a project, it's a lot better than it used to be... and it did seem to be catching up with me.

In the past when I'd pushed the sleep issue back for days, I'd just get tired and slow down. I'd tell my body what was expected of it, and it'd do its best, just slower. I've been reading some lit on the formations of unions lately, and disturbingly I think my body itself may have been listening. Perhaps it's the mid-20s just catching up with one, but I'm not used to falling asleep unless I give the A-OK.

Maybe while driving, when you're sort of being lulled, but even then it bothered me. Trying to wean myself from four strong pots of coffee a day down to two, while simultaneously backing off of the nicotine probably isn't helping the situation.

Nothing freaks me out like waking up with the realiziation that you hadn't known you'd gone to sleep... and hitting snooze 40 times on the alarm isn't the same as waking up late and not realizing that the alarm somehow got turned off, or that it's been going off for an hour and you just didn't hear it.

Last night I got home late, and knew I had to get some work done for today. It'd been a long day, and the continued stream of hate mail had my throat pining for something cold and alcoholic, but the fridge was bare. Some people just don't respect the 'last beer' rule, which means if you take a cold one, you replace it with a warm one.

I threw it in the freezer to chill to optimimum temperature while I spread out on the couch and watched some Charlie Rose (I love Charlie Rose's interviews) and within a few minutes I was out, only to be awoken by a loud popping noise and the scittering of bits of glass.

To my shame, that popping noise was the end result of the beer freezing while I dozed. I'm unamused by the feelings of loss and guilt it caused.

When you come to identify something as a thing of beauty, to have some connection to it, seeing it wasted or not being used in its intended fashion can really rankle. There is also the notion that something is created for a purpose, and when that potential is not being fulfilled, you're letting that thing down.

This is why you'll often see uber geeks pause on the street with heads bowed and hats clutched to their chest when they see a computer left out for trash, and why while a car on a showroom floor can make you swoon, some intrinsic part of you knows that cars are made to be driven.

I decided to put the feelings of guilt and loss aside to deal with later and poured a glass of Grand Marnier to sip while I finished Charlie Rose, and promptly fell asleep again. Unamusing.

Then a friend called at 4am, frantic because their iBook was dead and they needed the files on it for that day. Hot coffee was promised, and possibly breakfast, so off I trundled through the cold blowing wind laced with snow.

Besides, she's pre-law, and it never hurts to get in on the ground floor with a lawyer. I'm a big fan of pulling thorns from a lion's paw whenever the possibility presents itself.

This poor girl hasn't had the best time with their dual-USB iBook; it's been sent back for repairs at least three times, and it's pretty flaky, although things have improved somewhat.

It's more partial to kernel panic'ing on waking from sleep than I'd like, and swapping out the RAM and other usual tricks didn't help. There are other issues, but I'd say she's not really happy with it. One thing Mac people don't talk about when they pull in new users is how many are leaving at the same time.

If you have a bad experience with a piece of hardware on Windows, you just switch brands... if your Mac experience kinda sucks, you switch platforms. And you generally don't come back.

Anyways, apparently there had been a kernel panic yesterday and she'd run Disk Warrior, which I recc'd she purchase, and last night she couldn't print, so she ran repair permissions and then Disk Warrior again. It was still going when she hit the sack, and was still going when she got up, which was where the worry came in.

It had been running for eight to nine hours, so I figured something must be up and rebooted. Her iBook was reporting 15 terabytes were free, which wasn't good. For some reason it refused to boot off of her Firewire Neptune HD, which I also wasn't amused by.

She needed a specific email with directions on where she was supposed to be in a few hours, as well as some stuff for that evening... and of course she hadn't done a backup in two weeks (She finds it too annoying. Why OS's don't come with integrated and easy to use backup solutions at this point is beyond me), and of course she'd just gotten the directions yesterday.

Opening up Mail, things got spookier. There was no mail. Blank. She commented on how fast it opened (that was quick! it always bounces a bunch of times for me) and I didn't have the heart to tell her that that probably wasn't a good thing. It did have her account information in Mail's preference pane, but nothing else. So, off to check Mail's files.

This wasn't good. To the finder, the 'Application Support' directory, where Mail stores its files (except for one of its preferences) was now considered to be a file. It did still say it was a directory, and kept the icon, but when clicked on it was being treated as a file of 4k. Basically, pretty much a blank file, as HFS+ only allows you to go down to 4k.

Ok, so launch the terminal and see what ls might see better than the Finder application, but Hmmmm, the Terminal.app doesn't want to launch. The console log was taunting me with its emptiness.

Figuring maybe something small was tripping up Disk Warrior I ran the standard Disk Utility, which said it was repaired... but while scrolling up I saw a whole bunch of 'extent allocation' errors, which is just nasty business.

Really nasty business. Disk Warrior is about the only thing that can repair these, and without a bunch of jargon they're caused by something going wrong and files getting overlapped... sorta. I know what it is, however I've never really heard what exactly causes it to start to happen systemically.

And while I love Disk Warrior (this affair really started with 10.1, which had a nasty bug that would cause firewire drives to get corrupted when you tried to transfer large files), ideally it's the kind of thing that just shouldn't be occurring at all... and if it's going to because of some innate cause of the product, at the very least Apple needs to buy Disk Warrior or include the same functionality.

This doesn't appear to be the kind of problem that just accrued over time, considering she'd just run everything the day before... something caused it, but what? Like most users, she couldn't remember what exact application she'd had up when it awoke from sleep and kernel panic'ed so there weren't a lot of clues there.

(as a side note, I don't hold users to the fire for that - I'm generally intimately aware of what my computer is doing, but if I am ever pulled into an investigation ala a TV crime show I am just screwed, as I can never remember where I was at a given time, let alone last Tuesday at 7:30pm when someone went missing)

Her application usage is pretty tame: iTunes, Microsoft Office, Mail, web browsing, and now a bit of iMovie (which was the impetus for the Firewire drive). Her drive was only half full.

A quick call to Alsoft (who were responsive) basically said that yeah, if it's stuck on "Step 6: optimizing..." it could be going for awhile, and yes, even though it seems to be stuck and the UI doesn't update, it's still working.

How long could it possibly go? He basically said "Who knows, a long damn time. Maybe the day, maybe the night too. And if Disk Warrior can't fix it, you'll have to send it to Drive Savers...". This meant my friend was basically screwed for that evening as far as her data was concerned, so I just left it to run and we'd see what would happen.

The big thing she was worried about was that someone or other had just sent a big iTunes gift certificate to her email ($100 - she likes her iTunes Store). You can get these a variety of ways, but one of the most popular (and last minute) ways it to have them sent as an email.

Give Apple your credit card number at the store (or via PayPal), plug in the persons email, and they get a nice little HTML-formatted email with the information they need to enter to get the moola. If you don't already have an account, you create one, otherwise you can redeem it and have the amount sitting in your account as a credit.

Her main question was... if I don't have that email, how do I get it? What I've found so far hasn't been encouraging. Apple's site says:

Can I receive a replacement gift certificate or prepaid card? We cannot issue a replacement gift certificate or prepaid card. Please treat prepaid cards and paper gift certificates like cash. If ordered an email gift certificate and you can't find the email from us, check in your email application's junk mail folder. Or, verify your email address with the person who purchased your gift certificate.

Yeah, that isn't sounding good. Kinda lame, to be honest. An email is, well, an email. It could not get to someone for a whole variety of reasons, including spam filters. Surely the necessary information would be somewhere on the invoice itself... but it's not.

I don't really use the iTunes Store, but I have a friend who is a huge fan, and I sent them one a week or so ago, and checking the receipt I saved... nada. After googling around for 15 minutes, I found that there's no phone support, but you can send an email and after a week you can get a reply.

They can't/won't reissue them, but they will cancel them and the person can be asked to get a new one. That, at least, is a little bit of good news... sort of. The word around the web doesn't seem to be good on this one... Apple's site says you'll get a response in 24 hours, but the word on the web you're looking at at least a week, with at least a few blogs saying it's been 2+ weeks and they've gotten no response.

At the very least, hopefully someone won't be out $100, but with Christmas in twelve days and things being very busy over there because of it, I'm honestly not looking forward to having that chat with her.

Why, if you have all of the information you needed to buy it, there isn't a way for someone to cancel and reissue it themselves in an electronic way isn't something I get. It's an awful lot of hassle to go through if you happened to misspell someone's email.

Going back to the hard drive situation, it's now 11 PM, and when I talked to her a half an hour ago Drive Warrior was still chugging away. She thinks at least. It's honestly hard to tell since the screen never updates. Perhaps the whole iTunes deal will be moot, as well as her angst over her lost files, if Disk Warrior completes its marathon and is able to recover her files.

I really hope it does... the closest I'll ever come to feeling like a doctor is having to tell someone their treasured data was slag. Since I don't work in tech support, these are usually friends, so it usually sucks.

While I'll report back on whether she is able to recover her holiday cheer, her situation did leave me pondering a couple of questions:

• How, if at all, has the process of backing up one's computer really changed over the last 5 years till now? From the last 10 years? The medium you might be backing it up onto may have changed, but has the process really been made easier and/or improved? If not, why?
• What could have caused her file system to spontaneously combust in the span of a day in the first place? I've pounded Linux filesystems (usually ext3) ten times harder than I ever have an HFS+ drive, yet I've never experienced half the problems HFS+ seems to bring to the table. An engineer who used to work on it told me once that you're just asking for corruption if you push an HFS+ past 80% capacity. Are my experiences an abberation, or is HFS+ just kinda sucky?
• There's a fairly rudimentary Windows Backup utility that's included on the WindowsXP and Windows2000 CDs, although it requires a separate install. Mac OS X includes... nothing. Apple has a new 'Backup' program, which you can get if you pay $99/year for .Mac. Is this really such an exotic feature request that users should be forced to buy a separate solution?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the majority of users are going to want to backup their data, just as the majority of users are going to want to have access to a web browser or TCP/IP stack.

It isn't as common an operation as it should be, but its still one the majority of users out there should have access to without paying a bunch extra. I'd think the capability would not only be ripe for rolling it into the OS, but that some of the technologies available now (Rendezvous or whatever it's called now, Wireless, etc.) could really improve things.

In my personal opinion, this feature passed ripe a generation ago and is now rotting on vine... and I find the whole situation perplexing.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    December 14, 2004, at 11:58 PM