Trouble, right here in River City - 21 May 2023

Far from troubles made up in the mind of a con artist, I have been having technology troubles for the last couple weeks.  About the first of May, there was a Mac OS patch that was distributed.  Now, I need to be clear that I can only claim correlation and I am not asserting causation, but my add-on disk failed at this time.  I use a USB "sidecar" disk because I have far more photo and music data than will fit on the SSD integral to my MacBook Pro.  For a while, I used an outboard 2 Tby drive, then I upgraded to a 4 Tby drive.  After the patch, the outboard drive became unreadable.  I struggled with this for a while and finally decided to rely on Time Machine backups.

I reformatted the outboard drive.  Fortunately, I had just upgraded my Time Machine drive so that I could back up both the integral and the outboard drives.  I thought myself lucky and then I started up Time Machine to recover the contents.  It worked well for a while, then Time Machine complained that the outboard drive was case-insensitive and I was trying to restore Mac Photos files with mixed case. 

I stopped at this point because we had some traveling to do.  When I got back, I tried to restore again and got the same error from Time Machine.  I bit the bullet and re-reformated the drive to be case-sensitive.  OK, should be solved.  Unfortunately, by this time, it had been about two weeks since the original failure, and Time Machine no longer has backups that are pre-failure.  I have tried repeatedly over the last week, and I just cannot get Time Machine to cough up a pre-failure copy of the outboard drive.

I have been in a bit of denial, but cold truth is cold truth.  I was starting to think about how I could restore files from my off-site backup.  You have a three-level backup strategy, right?  A primary, a local backup, and a remote backup, yes?  Well, I do.  I have lost files before and I plan never to do it again.  Then I had a flash of insight.  I had replaced the 2 Tby outboard drive with a 4 Tby outboard drive toward the end of 2022, and I still have the old 2 Tby outboard drive.  It is not a whole backup, but it is better than dragging 2 Tby from my off-site backups.  

I am now in the process of copying over from the 2 Tby outboard drive to the 4 Tby outboard drive.  When that is done, I shall start recovering the last six months of data.  I am very annoyed at Apple, but I have a plan that I think will work.

Photo: we are in the midst of the rhodedendron season.