About two weeks ago I managed to bork my computer. It wasn’t anything too serious… I just had to reinstall Snow Leopard onto my mac. While this may sound like a horrible thing never to be repeated, I actually like doing it now and again. It helps get rid of the cruft that an OS builds up over time, and gives it that “new computer” feel. Though Mac doesn’t seem to build up nearly as much cruft as Windows XP it has to be said…
How did I bork it? Well to be honest, it was complete user error. I have filevault installed on my mac which encrypts my Home directory so that its reasonably well protected from hackers and such. One thing that it does is create a .sparsebundle directory which holds all of the encrypted content, and it decrypts the files from this on the fly as it needs them. Why this is all a lovely idea, and seems to work just fine, as always theres the PEBKAC problem. (P.E.B.K.A.C. = Problem exists between keyboard and computer)
Recently I noticed that my hard disk was feeling awful full, so I decided to run an analysis to see where the problem was. Seems some file called chrissalij.sparsebundle was taking up 80Gigs :O. Well that had to be deleted right away, we couldn’t have some un-openable file taking up 80 gigs. So off to the trash you go…. Oh wait, the Operating System wont let me delete you? Well then lets go to the command line..
$ sudo rm -rf chrissalij.sparsebundle
Haha. Got ya there didn’t I? Now you’re deleted. Oh wait… Why can’t I open any files, why is my operating system telling me to log out… Why can’t I log back in…..
OH FUCK!
Yes people, I did just delete the contents of my home directory. All 80 or so gigs of it, including all my music, pictures and everything else. Cue frantic searching online, and the downloading of all the various data recovery tools I could find. Needless to say I was not successful. I managed to recover plenty of files, but the .sparsebundle stores all the data in 8mb text files, when when theres thousands of those to string together in the perfect order…. well it just isn’t worth the effort.
So I reinstalled my OS and I’m now running a nice and clean computer, free from filevault or anything else. I lost all my music and photos. Luckily I had backed up all my college work and documents and stuff using Dropbox, so I got that all back in a jiffy. But the music and pictures will have to be rebuilt.
So why do I bring this up now, roughly two weeks later? Apart from admitting my foolishness, and providing myself as a warning to others? Well I just finished re-ripping every CD in the house – 208 albums. There is an upside though, now my music collection is perfect, every single CD has cover art and all the info. Now just to download a few more songs, from …. ahem … various sources and I’ll be up and running.
As for the photo situation, well that’ll take more time as I’ll probably have to contact several people to try and get everything back together.
And you know the most ironic part? I was actually trying to configure my mac to perform a scheduled backup. So in order to save my data, I lost it.