When the Mac Hits the Fan

The title will get a handful of you laughing who know exactly the circumstance to which I am referring. For everyone else just know that it means bad things happening with your mac laptop.

Speaking of bad things happening with mac laptops, I recently tried to apply the latest software updates from apple, and it didn’t go so smoothly. To start with the update didn’t apply and then when I rebooted OS X wouldn’t finish initializing. I booted off the install CD and used disk utility to repair my drive, but to no avail. DiskUtility fixed a permissions issue, but could not repair the disk. It got stuck on “incorrect node structure” or some such. Apparently DiskWarrior comes highly recommended for fixing these types of issues, but I didn’t have $100 bucks to shell out to fix my problem. However, I was able to boot my laptop into target disk mode and pull everything off onto another computer, before reinstalling and restoring. YUCK!

It seems like there must be a better way to recover from catastrophic failures. I could force myself to create a complete bootable backup before installing anymore updates. This is what I probably will do in the short term even though it is rather time consuming.

The other option is to somehow move all the important stuff onto the network, like Chris was talking about the other day, with remote home directories.

In general I want to decrease the time for recovery. I think this will probably involve a combination of technologies and will be definitely be one of my pet projects from now on. Maybe I will even get it down to a single capistrano command ;)