Hurried

Playground, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today I wasn't able to go out until at children's bedtime. I had meetings one after another and some of them lasted so long that I managed to get to the next meeting only when it was already closing down. And others I had to leave in the middle to get to the next one. Not so nice.

But I'm feeling good nevertheless. The iMac which had disk troubles last weeked is doing well, no symptoms of breakage so far. And the computer is in fact significantly faster in disk operations compared to before, so it may be that there were some indications of failure already apparent before the filesystem corruption.

But lesson learned: backup, backup, backup. And test that it actually works. I'm currently in the process of thinking how to improve my system from the current one. I'm using one external Time Machine backup disk plus another (smaller) disk where I copy all media files a couple of times each year, and then I have some backups on the net. In addition, a bootable backup disk would be nice to have.

Filesystem corrupted - the bad news and the good

Stream, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Leaf carpet, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Roadside, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Do you have a current backup of your photographs and software? Luckily I had.

During the weekend I lost all files on the iMac at home, due to filesystem corruption. This happened when I needed to move the computer to another room, and it didn't start up any more. Before that the iMac had been running over 38 days in succession without problems.

Luckily I had a backup, which was less than one hour old, on the Time Machine backup disk. Long story short, after initializing the disk, installing Mac OS X from scratch and copying all data (over 500 GB of it) from the Time Machine backup disk, we are back to normal. (This took over four hours.)

Now everything works. All settings are the way they were and all software and files were preserved as they were.

But a small worry is nagging: perhaps the problem will reappear?

On the other hand, the computer seems faster, which may be due to a "fresh" Mac OS X installation. The previous system was upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, always on top of the previous one. Than may have been one reason for the problem.

So, now that I have been warned, I'll be even more diligent about backups.

Here are three photographs taken today, when the sun had set. A clouded night as has been so often lately.

Spiraling towards darkness

Spiral, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Fallen, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Apples, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I'm feeling tired, have been doing some renovation at home. But I guess some of the tiredness is caused by the shortening days, as it is increasingly hard to get a good amount of sunshine each day.

Here are three recent photographs, showing a bit of sunshine, a bit of the approaching darkness.