As I wrote a few days ago, this week was off to a sub-par start in the Hardy household: our furnace broke and my computer hard drive crashed. The good news is that both are up and running again (for the most part).
We had a lucky break regarding the furnace in that the cold snap was only a snap and the weather warmed up enough that we didn't need it much past the weekend. Our electric and kerosene heaters helped us limp along and by the time the repair people came out Wednesday, we were back into the 70s.
The furnace guys confirmed my suspicion that the gas valve was the problem. This is the main valve that allows gas to flow from the house's gas line into the burner tray where the heat gets made. Our furnace has a pilot light and as a safety measure, a temperature sensor is installed close to the pilot light to detect its combustion and ignition ability. If the light is out, the gas valve won't allow gas to flow into the burner tray or to the pilot light. When lighting the pilot light, holding down a switch on the gas valve allows a manual override of this sense and gas can flow just to the pilot light. Holding the switch down and lighting the pilot light allows the temperature sensor to warm up and once its hot, the switch can be released and the pilot light will stay lit; the temperature sensor has given the thumbs up to the gas valve that the gas being released to the pilot light will get burned. In our case, releasing the switch extinguished the pilot light indicating that the gas valve was under the impression that the pilot light was not heating the temperature sensor.
When replacing the temperature sensor didn't solve my problems I suspected the gas valve would need replacing; it did. The furnace guys spent a bit over an hour cleaning the furnace and replacing that valve. They said our furnace was in good shape and that our particular brand had a reputation for longevity (though not efficiency). A few hundred dollars to the nice repair men and we had a working furnace.
The computer repair has been more laborious. When your hard drive dies, all the data on it dies as well; hard drives die all the time and to the extent that data is valued, a robust backup strategy is a good idea. Much to my surprise, I ended up using three of the four backup strategies we have in place during this repair process. As I write this, I'm still working out a few of the details but I suspect everything will be back to normal shortly.
Strategy 1: Superduper!
Superduper! does one things extremely well: make a complete copy of your hard drive onto an external drive. The most beautiful, wonderful thing about having a exact copy of your formerly working drive is that you can immediately pick up where you left off when your main drive dies. This is exactly what I did: when I realized that Apple's oddly prescient email had come true, I booted from my cloned drive, did a few last minute house-keeping items for school on it, and then shut the computer down to take it in for repair. Having the cloned drive gave me peace of mind that all was well and that I could safely send the computer in. (I clone our drives every night so at most, we should be out a day of data).
When I got my computer back from the shop, Superduper! also made the restore process easy: I simply used my clone as the source for the data and copied it all back onto the internal hard drive. Six hours later (!) I rebooted my mac using the new internal drive and all was exactly as I left it a week ago.
Except for iTunes.
Though all the data was still on my drive: iTunes had some serious memory problems. I suspect this had to do with the program being in the middle of downloading podcasts when the drive died. It had forgotten all of the podcasts I had subscribed to and almost all of the applications and data on our iPad. When I plugged in the iPad yesterday evening (after getting my computer back up), it "backed up" the iPad and removed most of the apps that I no longer had listed in iTunes.
To be clear, we still had all the applications and data for the iPad on my computer; the iPad just didn't know it. So how to get my iPad looking like it did a week ago? iTunes only keeps one latest backup and that one was missing all applications and data. If only there was a way to get iTunes to use an older version of the backup...
Strategy 2: Time Machine
Time Machine specializes in keeping historical records of files. Superduper! remembers nothing but the most recent state of the entire drive; Time Machine keeps track of previous versions of your files and makes it pretty easy to copy an old version from its' archive back onto the main drive. (The big disadvantage of Time Machine is that you can't start your computer up from it. Once your computer is running and you have a working hard drive installed, you can use it to restore your data but there is no painless, up-and-running-again like Superduper!).
I found where iTunes keeps its backup of the iPad, activated Time Machine, went back a week to right before my hard drive failed, and restored that larger, complete backup of the iPad. Then using iTunes I restored the iPad from this complete backup and in ten minutes, my iPad was back to its original state.
As far as the podcasts go, I decided to resubscribe to them manually. I still have the files for any of the historical episodes I like to keep, and the resubscription process took only a few minutes.
Strategy 2: Crashplan
We use Crashplan as our doomsday, online backup. In the event our house burns down or a tornado takes all our computers to Oz, our most valuable data (photographs, legal documents...) are all stored off-site in the "cloud" and can be retrieved once our lives get back in order. Though I didn't need to use Crashplan to restore any lost data, I did use it to get access to my resume while my computer was being repaired. Crashplan provides a browser to all of the files it has stored and if you known where to find the file in question, it can be restored to whatever computer you're using at the time. Though I don't recommend using this as a primary "cloud" file storage solution due to the laborious interface, it allowed me access to my files when and where I needed them and that is very handy.
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