Last week I finally cracked. My Windows XP partition had lasted two years on my MacBook Pro, for as long as I’d had it. It had come close to being wiped a few times in the past but had always won a stay of execution because there had always been a job on so I didn’t have time to reinstall all the applications. I’d cleaned out the temporary files more times than I cared to remember but they’d gradually eaten up all the free disk space like spam in an email Inbox causing the thing to grind to a halt again. It was going to have to go.
I only use Windows because my translation software doesn’t run on anything else. I’m looking at Mac-based systems but have yet to find the right work flow. All my other work is on OS X and increasingly through a web browser, like writing this post.
I’m careful with my work files. As I work on a desktop and a laptop, I always have two, if not more copies of each. At the end of each year, I burn everything to DVD to have an extra back up or an archive. So I’m pretty much covered with back-ups.
Even so, I did another back up, with Apple’s Time Machine this time, just for good measure.
There’s something thrilling and scary about wiping a disk. I pressed the Erase button at let the process roll. Mac OS was installed quickly and I did the partition to install Windows 7. Once that was done, I went back to OS X restore my data.
I’d never restored data from Time Machine before but it was surprisingly easy. The Documents and Downloads folders came back fine, the Desktop too. Then it stopped. No Applications.
I looked around, I restarted the process. Nothing. Then I remembered, I’d excluded Applications or Applications Support from the back up to save disk space.
Always have a back up, everyone says it. Just remember to back up everything you want to restore.
