Rebuilding a digital life from the pieces

I hate it when a computer dies. Everything is backed up (theoretically) but it is still a trauma to go and get back everything especially when you are updating operating systems at the same time. You also find out any holes in the back up regime such as slow restores. Even on a fast connection some of the restores are taking hours when they should be done much faster. Nothing you can do but set them off and wait!

First up was to get Itunes library back. Need music to suffer the rest of the hassle! That wasn’t too bad as I happened to have copied off the library onto a removable drive (wish I’d done my photo library at the same time…) so it was easy to import into Itunes. Music on and now for the rest….

Lion is horrible when you first start it. No drive icons on the desktop so you have this feeling of being lost in the ether. Took a while to find them in finder preferences. Feels more sensible when you have them back. Loaded the tablet driver with tablet scroll mouse. Things started to feel more normal again. Got most of the software back on that was missing.

Email was more tricky. For some reason your user’s library area isn’t shown in finder so my cunning plan to restore my local folders straight back into the new thunderbird profile was scotched. I had to resort to noodling into terminal and doing a unix copy to achieve the same thing. Works fine but it would have been so much easier had I been able to see the library folder. You can see it with an option click sometimes but within a program save dialog that isn’t going to be available.

Worst problem I had was stored passwords and finding out some bugger has changed Xmarks so you can’t back up passwords without using lastpass or somesuch. It wasn’t working at all and I had this horrible feeling I was going to lose all stored passwords which would have been a disaster. Luckily firefox sync is actually included in later firefoxes. It used to suck. Now it doesn’t. Set up the laptop which has a copy of everything on it as I’d been using xmarks. Synced with FF. Added the new computer and bingo! All saved passwords and bookmarks etc returned.

App store is quite good for finding software but it seems to be more expensive than just getting the same product from a company’s website. Not been able to find exact replacements for some things.

New tweetdeck is awful. No reply all and the block user and other user functions are two clicks instead of one. Also it seems to have stopped loading the last 200 tweets when you start it up so there are large gaps. I thought this had been fixed ages ago. It had but they have put it back! Growl doesn’t seem to be picking up tweetdeck or thunderbird as potential notification sources for some reason.  I forget how I got it to work before as it was such a long time ago.

Latest Iphoto has some facial recognition guff in it. You can’t turn it off. It just slows it down. I quit Iphoto while it was still doing its facial scan so it crashed immediately when I tried to start it up again. Crashed several times until I rebooted the whole machine. Then it would start and restored its windows. So frustrating that it has features I do not want, that cause problems and that cannot be switched off. I sent a report to apple with a request for an off button… I may move to aperture instead. It has the same facial recognition features but you can switch them off. Seeing as Iphoto though a car light cluster was a face it really is useless anyway.

New keyboard is much nicer though. I went for the wired as I can’t be bothered with bluetooth keyboards or mice. Flat battery at an awkward moment. No thanks. Not even unpacked the new mouse. Used the old one I had from the G5 which I didn’t use either. Tablet driver isn’t always loaded fast enough so sometimes when you first start using it there is a delay before it picks it up. New screen is nice and whole machine performance is really good which I’d expect from a quad core compared to an ancient G5…got another 4GB of memory to go in. 4 memory slots and no need for matched memory either so it is a lot less awkward. Apple wanted a phenomenal £160 for another 4GB. Macupdate wants about £30 for the same.

I hope this mac lasts 7 years. I don’t think I could face having to do it all again much sooner!