About 4 month ago the internal hard drive of my MacBook died. The problem is that I don’t own a second Mac or have another Mac in my family which means that I’m not able to get on working like normal and have to move over to my old windows machine for work, which is not really possible cause nearly all applications I use are Mac only. The last time it took about 3 days till my new drive arrived and I was able to restore my files via my Time Machine backup. This time was a little different. My internal hard drive died again some days ago. Here is the story what happened and how I got out of it.

Apple File Vault

Normally I’m not a big fan of Apple’s File Vault and for that reason I haven’t activate it till the 25c3. I thought that would be a security option which I shouldn’t miss. So, I activated it, went to the 25c3 and nothing happened. I came back home and plugged my Time Machine hard drive into my MacBook and still nothing unusual happened. But some days ago – it was the first of January – after that I came back to my MacBook and it wouldn’t start.

Restoring

That was the first moment I thought that, there is something wrong. Future testing and it turned out that the hard drive broke again. I was lucky that a family member of mine was able to give me a 2.5″ hard dive to plug into my MacBook and I was serious that I’m able to restore the system with my Time Machine backup. But that turned out to be wrong. I tried to install the system via the Mac OS X 1.5 Leopard DVD and restoring, everything went well. I tried to log in and an error message popped up saying that something was wrong with the users File Vault image.

Seeing something like this really scares me. All work gone? All pictures taken at the 25c3 gone? But I didn’t gave up. I tried again, this time with the last Time Machine Backup made just before I left without File Vault turned on. And the restore and the following login went smoothly. But there was still the problem with my Aperture Library which was rearranged entirely in this few days I was not at home. There I just had luck, that I backed up the Library via Aperture Vault just after coming home. I restored the Aperture Library via this Vault and had my system back where it’s now. Just some little changes, some text files and apps deleted, some new installed and written down some text and everything works again.

Conclusion

That’s the story how Apple’s Time Machine and Aperture’s Vault saved all my work don mostly in 2008. And I even learned a big something, that I have to be careful with File Vault and should use more than one way to back up my files – on a regular bases.
Have you ever had such a extreme case of backup need?

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