Saved by backups.
It’s 2:30am, and I have got to give a shout-out to PsyncX. My OS X installation went all crazy this afternoon, a result of some overlapping files, including a dozen core system files. (Which resulted, no doubt, from yanking out the power cord mid-boot after an incident involving a dishwasher, a moderately sized man-made lightning bolt in the living room, and the circuit breaker.) I flailed around for a couple of hours this evening, trying to debug things, unwilling to resort to restoring from my last backup from two weeks ago.
Little did I know that I’d configured PsyncX to perform nightly backups. I got up at 4am on Black Friday, shamefully, to buy a 200GB hard drive for $29. I installed it that day, created a Backup partition, and set up PsyncX and, though I’d forgotten, instructed it to back up my entire hard drive at 3am each night. When I finally realized this, I simply booted off of the duplicated hard drive and ran PsyncX in reverse, restoring yesterday’s backup of the System and Library folders. I rebooted and, easy as could be, my system was restored to its previous state.
I guess I’ve finally learned, after two decades of periodically losing massive amounts of data due to lack of backups. Go me.
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