So yesterday I posted that I had made some errors in judgement, but I did not expound on this, which I know drives some people crazy. Today I am ready to tell the full story.
My Mac had been starting to run slow, and the IT guys at work had a new image that could be put on the machine to try to fix things up. I decided this was probably a good idea since I had been testing their patience a bit with my overzealousness for upgrading. So I backed everything up – the work stuff to their cloud service and the full hard drive to an external machine. I figured I was covered. The machine got its shiny new image, and I started the process of getting things restored. Everything came in from the cloud service just fine. The only issue was that I had to re-sync the files from my team’s shared space on Box. Then I plugged in the hard drive to restore everything else. After recognizing the drive, it asked if I wanted to user encryption. I almost decided to grab the data first, but then I figured to go ahead.
What’s the worst that can happen?
My thinking was that the computer was asking me if I wanted my future backups encrypted. It actually wanted to encrypt the entire disk. So it started this incredibly long-running process, during which it looked like my previous backups were inaccessible. This did not make me happy for multiple reasons, not the least of which was that I had to leave the machine running overnight at work so the encryption could complete. Still, I assumed that once the process finished, I’d be able to get to the backup.
When I got to work this morning, the encryption had finished! Yay! The backups were still not available! Curses! I couldn’t find any answers online, and when I called the Apple Store they just told me to come on in. So I pretty much had to punt and wait until I could go in, which I did tonight. I explained the problem to my assigned Genius, and he gave me a perplexed look. Not good. I fired up the machine and showed him how the backups were not available from inside the Time Machine application. He was still perplexed. Then he suggested we try something else.
“Go into Finder and just select the hard drive. Yeah, now you can see the folders for each one of the backups…and you can just select the one you want…and there’s all the data.”
My elation was tempered by my humiliation at a solution that I think Kate might have been able to stumble upon. We did run into a weird permissions problem that wouldn’t let me copy the entire folder all at once, but it became evident that the best course of action was to work around that rather than solve it. So everything is back to normal now and life can go on.
So what have we learned? Think through things – several times – before major operations on the hardware. Also, I’m not always quite so smart as I might like to think.
