Why I love OS X

composercomposer
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
This may be a slightly off-topic story, but at the heart of it is really why, and I mean WHY I love Apple and OS X.



About a year ago I bought an external LaCie hard drive to use for backups and as a working directory for my music projects. I partitioned it into several sections which allowed me to discreetly manage each project I was working on, and helped to keep everything of my main drive.



Anyway, after completing several (about 10) major projects I moved them into a large "archival" partition, wiped everything clean and started working on new projects.



About 2 months (August-2003) later I went into my archive to dig through some old stuff to make a CD for my family for Christmas. I double-clicked on the icon and went searching. The directories I had copied were there and when I opened one.



Nothing was there.



Nothing.



Shit.



Opened another one...nothing.



NOTHING!



Well, there were some older projects I transferred when I first bought the drive, and some other stuff, but everything I had transferred prior to reformatting the other partitions was gone. Even my backups (yes, I do backup) had nothing.



Keep in mind that 2 months had passed and I had been read/writing to that partition so I thought everything was gone.



I felt like crawling into a hole and dying. I lost some of my best work. I lost ideas I had been working on for years.



Then last night I opened the drive again to archive some other projects and I noticed a curious folder:



lost+found



I didn't put it there. So I opened it. In it were directories labeled:



7589

7592

7637

8126

8256

8315

8723

8902

9152

9353

9445

9567

9683



So I opened one. And There it was.

ALL OF MY WORK RESTORED!



Every folder contained everything I ever transferred over prior to "the great wipe of '03".



I was saved!



How did this happen? Turns out I owe it all to fsck. See, prior to installing Panther, I fsck'd all of my drives just to make sure everything would go smoothly. It did, and it found all the driectories I transferred over (minus their names, of course) and put them in this lost+found folder.



Yeay!



Lessons Learned:

1. Verify Transfers

2. Verify Backups

3. Love the Unix-y goodness of Mac OS X



-Composer
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 34
    lainlain Posts: 140member
    A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold, the bird froze and fell to the ground in a large field. While it was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on it. As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, it began realize how warm it was. The dung was actually thawing him out! He lay there all warm and happy, and soon began to sing for joy. A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate. Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung, and promptly dug him out and ate him!



    Lesson:



    1) Not everyone who drops shit on you is your enemy.

    2) Not everyone who gets you out of shit is your friend.

    3) And when you're in deep shit, keep your mouth shut!
  • Reply 2 of 34
    dmband0026dmband0026 Posts: 2,345member
    I'm glad you got all your stuff back! Your right, you do gotta love OS X.



    Lain...uhhh...I'm not sure what the point of that was, but I want the 30 seconds of my life back that it took to read that.



    And in the future, OS X threads would probably be better suited for the OS X forum.
  • Reply 3 of 34
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by DMBand0026

    And in the future, OS X threads would probably be better suited for the OS X forum.



    And as such...



    Moving!
  • Reply 4 of 34
    lainlain Posts: 140member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by DMBand0026

    Lain...uhhh...I'm not sure what the point of that was, but I want the 30 seconds of my life back that it took to read that.



    Point was, that it was OSX that stuffed him around and it was OSX that fixed it. Either way OSX caused him to worry, so I can not see anything to brag about.



    If it was WinXP that screwed him over and OSX that fixed it... now thats something to write home about.



    Sorry about the 30 secs.
  • Reply 5 of 34
    composercomposer Posts: 212member
    Thanks for the story. Unfortunately, I've heard it before. While similar, I'm not sure it applies.



    Actually I hold myself to blame, and since there's a significant time lag between the time I lost the data to when I recovered it, who knows? I might have accidently deleted the data myself, which means that the OS is utterly blameless. Shit can happen when moving large amounts of data around (~20GB). I should have taken the time to verify that I put things where I meant to put them, instead of doing a rush job to get to the next big project.



    If this had happened on a windows volume, I would be SOL without an unerase utility ($$$), and after monthsof use? I doubt that there would have been anything left.



    There was the convergence of two elements here:

    1. Pure Dumb Luck

    2. Good OS Design (both FreeBSD&Mac OS X)



    I'm very happy to be the recipient of both.
  • Reply 6 of 34
    mattjohndrowmattjohndrow Posts: 1,618member
    happy for you man
  • Reply 7 of 34
    maccrazymaccrazy Posts: 2,658member
    I thought partioning erased all data on the Hard Disk?
  • Reply 8 of 34
    scavangerscavanger Posts: 286member
    Partioning only changes the MBR and the Partion Tables. The data still would have to be overwritten like anything else. You can recover it with a bit of work. I used to be able to recover stuff by running an old x86 box with MS-DOS.
  • Reply 9 of 34
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    It's a bit more complicated than just mucking with the tables, you know.



    Assume you have 80GB as one partition and you want to make two, 40GB each. You have 30GB currently on the drive, so no problem, right?



    Well... what about files that might be residing in the top 40GB? It's entirely possible, in which case those would have to be identified and compacted down into the bottom 40GB before repartitioning could be done. In such a case, deleted files would be likely to be overwritten.



    A disk defragmentation down into the low areas of the drive, followed by an immediate fiddling with the headers could do what you want, and some tools do just that, but it's not as trivial as just playing with the layout tables.
  • Reply 10 of 34
    scavangerscavanger Posts: 286member
    bah. you've made my reasonably understandable explaination complicated.
  • Reply 11 of 34
    maccrazymaccrazy Posts: 2,658member
    Shouldn;t you just back up the hard drive before partitioning to be safe?
  • Reply 12 of 34
    scavangerscavanger Posts: 286member
    You really shouldn't repartition with critical data on the hard drive in the first place... Usually you should partition before you install anything including the OS
  • Reply 13 of 34
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by MacCrazy

    Shouldn;t you just back up the hard drive before partitioning to be safe?



    Shouldn't you just back up the hard drive *ALL THE TIME* to be safe?



  • Reply 14 of 34
    composercomposer Posts: 212member
    I could but...



    I've started using my iDisk to create ongoing backups of my files. So far it's too small to put huge music files on, but sufficient for Sibelius Files, word documents, etc.
  • Reply 15 of 34
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Well, I'm about to go post in a more relevant thread on backup solutions, but RsyncX 2.0 was just released. W00t!



    Free solution based on the rather bulletproof-esque rsync command line tool, updated to handle HFS+ metadata and resource forks (which the Apple supplied version does *not*), and some simple GUIs to get you running, manage a server daemon, generate scripts, etc.



    *THIS* is why *I* love MacOS X.



    Take some good solid Unix tools, slap a quick and easy Cocoa GUI over the top, and let 'er rip.
  • Reply 16 of 34
    maccrazymaccrazy Posts: 2,658member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Kickaha

    Shouldn't you just back up the hard drive *ALL THE TIME* to be safe?







    But if your erasing the hard drive that's more risky than day to day use! Think about it, your risking everything on your computer and then hoping your data recovery will work, i only use my data recovery in emergencies, i don't make myself have to use it.
  • Reply 17 of 34
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    ???



    So... that's an argument *against* backing up??



    Hernh?
  • Reply 18 of 34
    maccrazymaccrazy Posts: 2,658member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Kickaha

    ???



    So... that's an argument *against* backing up??



    Hernh?



    Are you talking to me? (not trying to be rude, just wasn't sure!) I do back up, i just would think if you are actually erasing all your data, you should be careful. Otherwise your asking to lose data.
  • Reply 19 of 34
    steve666steve666 Posts: 2,600member
    I'm having enough trouble with OSX to make me think Im using Windows. It may say 'Mac' in front of 'OSX' but it aint a Mac.



    Mr. Luddite
  • Reply 20 of 34
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by steve666

    I'm having enough trouble with OSX to make me think Im using Windows. It may say 'Mac' in front of 'OSX' but it aint a Mac.



    Mr. Luddite



    Based on another one of your recent threads, I'd say it looks like you're trying too hard to make Mac OS X act like Mac OS 9. This is a mistake that many "luddites" make that invariably makes the transition much more difficult and confusing than it should be.



    Mac OS X is a major evolution of the Classic system. A lot of things act the same; a lot of things are different. If you aren't willing to jump in feet-first and start embracing these changes, you might as well stick with your aging hardware and Mac OS 9.
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