Personal disaster recovery
Today was probably the most disastrous day of Mac ownership for me. I had previous smashed the casing on my old PowerBook when the dog tripped over the cord, but this really took the biscuit. I was at work when I leaned over the desk to grab my headphones. Somehow, I managed to bring a fresh cup of tea with them and soaked my MacBook Pro.
Worse in this situation was that it wasn’t the “posh” tea I’m so fond of but the office garbage. As such it was full of milk and more importantly, sugar. It is fried. No ifs, no buts, fried.
While I wait for my new MacBook Air (and indeed insurance claim), I will be using the dreaded loaner from work. I know I should be thankful I have anything at all for the next couple of weeks, but damn this thing is a dog. It’s an original MacBook Pro 15". 1.83GHz Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo, so just 32-bit) with 1GB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. I realise many people are on far worse machines but bare in mind it’s the loaner. The hard drive has paid its dues, the screen is hanging off, the fans are crying their final cries and as I found out earlier the battery is simply dead weight.
I am so glad I still have my iPhone, but there are some things I simply require a computer for (such as much of the software we use at work). While setting this machine up today I realised how dependant I am on two services:
On attempting to download Dropbox app earlier the website happened to go down for maintenance for maybe 4 or 5 minutes. It was very distressing. I didn’t have the app and I couldn’t download my data. Thankfully it came online shortly thereafter but I was hit with another barrier: agilewebsolutions website was also down. So now I had my passwords, but I had no way of getting to them.
Thankfully I found an old copy of the software which was new enough to open the keychain (even without the update I couldn’t have downloaded) right from Apple.com. Lucky. Just download Chrome and I’m good to go – the rest I can now access with my passwords, serials and the work software server (for safe keeping).
So remember folks – this storing online can come in handy, but only if you have access to the services. Thanks to both companies who saved my bacon today though.
