TimeCapsule to the Rescue, Kinda

The first thing law about backups is that you’ll need it when you least expect it.  Me being the idiot optimist ordered the exact same Hitachi 2.5 inch SATA hard drive that failed on me last time.  What do you know, this time the hard drive failed last time.  I woke up in the morning to dreadful hard drive needle sounds and finally eerie silence.  I new the drill so I didn’t waste time ordering a new hard drive (this time a 320GB Western Digital) from amazon via iphone (they had a really good interface).

Unfortunately, I tried a TimeCapsule restore via wifi which was mass hysteria as my mac went into sleep while restoring 20% after a full day and a half running.  As a result, my TimeCapsule permissions got borked. 

I went out and bought a LAN cable (you don’t need a cross cable, just so you now) to connect the mac to TimeCapsule directly.  I tried a bunch of dirty tricks mounting the drive from terminal and repairing permissions both with fsck_hfs and Disk Utility.  After a couple tries, the TimeCapsule backup became mountable and showed up.  Next I ran migration assistant from a vanilla install which was all spectrums of FAIL.  So I reinstalled Leopard via DVD and ran the TimeMachine restore as part of the new install.  Aside from reinstalling developer tools all is well.  So yeah, I wish I had the TC last time but now I do, but if I had a choice I’d just back up to a USB external and save some money.  I also wish I had a spare mac or even one of those cheap unix PCs I could use.  The iPhone did suffice for most purposes though.