Well, at least I have a backup . . . sort of

In late March, Time Machine quit working properly.  It was an easy thing to fix, something I’ve fixed at least twice before . . . basically my computer couldn’t write to the Time Machine drive and it would’ve taken about five to fifteen minutes to fix.

But, you see, it would’ve involved rebooting, and I discovered it while I was in the middle of something.  Then I kept forgetting about it until I was in the middle of something, until it’d been so long since it’d made a backup that I didn’t feel like fixing it and letting it because it slows the computer down some while it runs.  And the cat likes to unplug the external drive Time Machine is on so I needed to do it sometime when I could sit here and keep her away from the motherfucking cord.

And then we moved and I had more important things to do than get this sorted out.  And then in the course of a week my iPod Touch got stuck in a rebooting loop and I broke the screen on my phone, so I decided it was probably best if I didn’t try to fix anything more technologically advanced than a pencil for a while.  (This was, possibly, a good decision.  I apparently had so angered the gods of technology that a fucking ball point pen, with plenty of ink and a good tip, suddenly wouldn’t write when I tried to use it!)

And then my hard drive corrupted.  This, honestly, shouldn’t have surprised me.  I’d been losing hard drive space mysteriously for some time, my Spotlight index was needing rebuilt every other time I rebooted, and a few days before I’d gotten a notification that an app was corrupted, and then had that app work perfectly without doing anything.  So something was clearly very wrong.

So, one day my computer is acting . . . well, like a six-year-old computer with a nearly full hard drive that’s been on for over a week.  Nothing unusual, really, just very slow.  So slow it’s basically locking up about once an hour, but not quite.  Then, right as I’m thinking “I should probably reboot and do that kind of reboot that clears the caches,” it does lock up.

Upon rebooting, it starts installing an update.  Okay, it’d been pestering me about there being one to install for awhile, but I hadn’t gotten around to it.  No big deal.

It gets partway through and turns off.

Fuck.

I try again and again and again.  Same thing.  I try the cache and other stuffs fixing reboot thingy.  No luck.  I google for likely problems and solutions.  It’s suggested that I boot to Recovery Mode and try to verify the disk.

I do so.  It can’t be fully verified.  I try Repair Disk.  It can’t be fully repaired.  A message appears on my screen informing me that the hard drive needs reformatted.

Fuck me.  This was on May 10th.  It turned out that the last Time Machine backup was on March 23rd!

I have — because I always expected something like this to happen, and because she likes to read stuff I’ve written — been in the habit of sending my wife what I’ve written every day for a long while.  So while I’ve lost everything else for the past month and a half, I at least have everything I’ve written.

I just have to go through emails and copy it back into documents I can work with.

Fuck.

And please don’t suggest I use any sort of cloud storage instead.  My last experiment with that did result in some stuff getting irretrievably lost.  No clue why.  The file looks like it’s there, but trying to open it just gets an error message.  I can’t afford that happening to stuff I’m writing.  And there’s no way in hell I could backup my whole computer to the cloud . . . I’d like to, just to have an offsite backup, but we’ve got satellite internet, so that’s definitely not happening any time soon.