It’s Like the Universe Doesn’t Want Me To Keep My Files

Considering the pains I take to ensure a reasonable level of storage backup around here, I seem to have to be concerned about it pretty regularly. Last night as the kids were in the bath, Tammy sat down at the computer and was presented with a dialog:

Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.

I’m sorry… what does that mean? A bit of searching found that the explanation was that the backup system had failed and couldn’t recover, and needed to start over. Aw, great. I’d had a continuous backup for three years, and now I needed to erase and start again? So I starting digging deeper, and to make a long story short, I think it’s a hardware failure of the storage disk.

But that wasn’t the worst part. When I started my research, the computer itself froze. For those who used computers about 15 years ago, that might not be big news, but for a modern OS to freeze is very rare.

Then it wouldn’t restart. It wouldn’t restart into Recovery Mode. The backup and the computer died simultaneously? What were the odds?

I did get it to start in Safe Mode, then into Recovery Mode. There was an error on the disk in the computer as well, which I fixed. Now the computer is running. But the question is for how long? Tammy will be off to get a new backup disk this morning from Best Buy. Then we’ll have a discussion about replacing the computer. It is four years old, and sees constant 24/7 use.

I think that the root cause of both failures is heat stress: the Time Capsule is hot from the WiFi hardware (Nochie loves to sleep on it if we let her) and so is the Mac Mini. Tammy wondered if the failure on the computer disk cascaded to making the backup disk fail. I can’t rule it out, but I don’t want to bet our files on it, either.

Updated

We didn’t end up doing what I thought we would. Instead of Tammy getting a new external drive for backups, she headed over to the Apple Store and bought a new Mac Mini to replace the old one which has been serving well since 2009. Here’s the new and old ones together (the white one is the old one):

We already had a lot of unused drive space for backups, and the new computer has a 1 TB drive inside it. So, the existing external drive will have the backup on it, along with the movie/TV episodes for iTunes.

The pros and cons were weighed, and in the end we saved a bit of money. By doing it this way, I didn’t get a completely maxed out Mac Mini (that would have been build-to-order from Apple’s website and taken a week or so to arrive), but we only paid the base $799 for the computer instead of $1249, and didn’t have to spend $250 for another drive.