Thanks to Lizzy and Will at the Apple Store in Palo Alto and thanks to my own pushy self for asking and re-asking "But perhaps if you try X thing you can copy over the profiles and the apps..." until they actually did it. Rather than slamming a new hard drive in there and telling me I should have backed up. (I did back up most documents but not apps or profiles.) So they got my computer back in under 2 days, and with everything except my Thunderbird email files which apparently got too corrupted by the HD failure. Luckily my own backup right before disk failure worked well and so I have my email archives mostly current. I might have lost about 2 hours worth of email at most, because my computer was on and might have downloaded stuff after the backup. (If only I had set up Thunderbird to be IMAP instead of POP.) It was pretty amazing though how pushy I had to be in order NOT to get back the new blank hard drive and admonition to do better backups. I understand, because I did IT for 4 years, and really felt like tipping them extra... The Apple Store really does work sometimes, and I appreciate the good idea of having some of the computer-fixing be right in front of you. Even if it doesn't work, you get to learn something and talk to a sympathetic human being. It's a good example of transparency of process and how that can be useful. Though so many people are sarcastic about the stupid "genius" name or about the frustration they experience, it's still the best computer service I've had.
Anyway! It's nice to have my computer back.
On "Checkmate" by Le Fanu, don't bother to read it. It blows, it's vilely anti-Semitic, I hated all the characters, the plot was dull and obvious, what else to say? Uncle Silas and the short stories were so great that I had high hopes. Checkmate wasn't even worth reprinting! Why did they bother?
I'm so glad your computer is feeling better! Thunderbird seems to be sensitive - I lost 3 months of business emails last time I upgraded... it was not a happy scene.
Posted by: Chloe | March 21, 2007 at 02:18 PM
chloe that sucks! I'm going to try to back up my mail every few days! It should be daily but.. that might not happen.
Or I shoudl suck it up and switch to IMAP.
Posted by: badgerbag | March 22, 2007 at 10:12 AM