Those of you who follow me on Facebook or on Twitter will know that my old 2007 MacBook Pro just died. I’ll take it to the Apple Store for them to check out, but I suspect it has gone to logic board heaven.
This is the first time I have ever had a computer I am actively working on die (I’ve never even had a drive failure), so here are some things I’ve learned from the process so far.
Don’t Tempt Fate
I have often joked “I hope my old computer dies so I will have an excuse to buy one of the shiny new ones.”
I also told someone a few days ago that I have been holding off upgrading to Lion because I wanted to do a fresh install, and haven’t found the time to do it.
Guess what? Now that I am getting both my wishes, it’s not so fun. Next time, I’ll keep my mouth shut.
Backups Make Things Annoying But Not Stressful
You know that expression “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”? Thankfully, one area where I do not fall into that category is with backups.
I do pretty much everything in this How To Backup Your Computer video. My SuperDuper! clone backup had run the day before, and my Time Machine backup had run an hour before.
I also have an online backup with CrashPlan and just to make things even more paranoid, I have my critical files backed up at a friend’s house.
I also tend to store whatever I am working on in Dropbox, so many files are backed up realtime to Dropbox’s servers.
All this is to say, while this whole process is annoying, at no point have I felt stressed out about losing anything important. It’s a nice feeling.
Love The Cloud
I am typing this on my wife’s old second-hand white MacBook, and since my failure, I have done pieces of things on my iPad, on this computer, on my Windows 7 laptop, and on my parents’ 27″ iMac.
All this is made super-easy with cloud services like Dropbox and Evernote. I can’t imagine what a pain things would be if I wasn’t able to seamlessly switch between computers and devices.
Also having my 1Password and TextExpander data synced has been incredibly helpful. My 1Password app on my iPhone has certainly been getting a workout. Not having TextExpander on my wife’s computer is like eating glass though – I am going to have to rectify this.
Mac App Store
The Mac App Store has been great for quickly installing applications. You don’t really appreciate it until you have to install a number of them all at once.
Life Didn’t Stop Because My Computer Died
Unfortunately, the real world kept going even though my computer didn’t. I had a hard deadline at 5pm yesterday for a new project I am working on for DocumentSnap, and the failure did slow me down a bit. I got it done though – at 4:52pm. Having things backed up and accessible is important if you are in a situation where downtime is a problem for you.
Fortunately for me, this all happened on a long weekend, so the only real impact will likely be no video post this week.
Look At It As An Opportunity
As the Monty Python song goes, I try to always look at the bright side of life. I had been meaning to do a clean install of Lion anyways, so this way I can go through and see what things I really need from my old computer and what had been junking up my computer over the last four years.
Also, my old MacBook Pro was getting pretty slow at doing video, so I’m looking forward to a new, faster computer.
Have you ever had a computer failure? How did the recovery go? Any more lessons learned? Let us know in the comments.
(Photo by andymangold)
