Back From the Dead in 60 Minutes or Less
This article could have also been titled, “Bootable Mirrored Backups are a Computer’s Best Friend.” I avoided a small catastrophe today thanks to a bootable mirrored backup created by SuperDuper! Believe it or not, my MacBook crashed (I think due to MacFUSE). In the few times that it has crashed in the past, it usually just takes a reboot to bring the machine back to life. I wasn’t so lucky this time.
When the machine rebooted, I was not greeted with the usual login screen. All I saw was a blank blue screen (not the Blue Screen of Death Windows users are familiar with, but just as ominous). Every few seconds it would flicker as if something was trying to restart. This was not good news. I tried booting into single user mode to see if running fsck on the disk would help, but it was no use. There was something corrupted in a system file that was causing the login screen (and just about everything else in the system) to crash while launching. Luckily, a few months ago I had started a fairly rigorous backup routine.
Every Monday night, I use SuperDuper! to mirror my MacBook’s hard disk. The key to this is that this is a bootable backup. In addition to the mirror, I also do incremental backups of my user files using Apple’s Backup available as part of .Mac. I rebooted the MacBook while holding down the Option key. This allows you to select which drive you want to boot from. I chose my bootable mirror, and it came up just fine. Once I logged in, I was able to copy the System folder from my mirrored backup to the hard drive in my MacBook using the ditto command. At this point, the only thing left to do was restart the MacBook from the internal disk and hope for the best. Lo and behold, it worked perfectly. My machine booted up beautifully, and I was back in business in under an hour.
Please let this be a lesson to you. Always make sure that you have a good backup plan that includes a bootable mirror. If I had only done backups of user files, it would have taken hours to reinstall the operating system, updates, then restore my files.
