Backups sometimes prove invaluable

[fantomfreq]

Apple realeased OS X 10.4.2 today. 10.4.2 is aimed at fixing almost all of the bugs reported so far in 10.4 and adding a little bit of functionality. I decided to install it as soon as I knew that it was available. However, after installing the update, Software Updater (elegent name for a program, isn't it?) hung hard. I had to hard reboot my computer, and it wouldn't quite get to the login screen. I booted to the Tiger CD and tried repairing the disk and repairing file permissions to no avail. The computer would just not boot to a login screen.

Luckily, I keep a backup that I update several times a week. I just happened to make a backup yesterday, so I booted to that backup on my external hard drive and cloned that drive to my internal drive. I then rebooted and sucessfully applied the update. So far, I've got no problems with the update (which seemingly runs faster than 10.4.1.)

The lesson here is that backups are invaluable and you won't appreciate that fact until you need one. No company is infallable, the nature of computers makes them unpredictable sometimes. The 45 minutes I spent cloning my external drive to my internal is peferable to the hours I would have spent if I had to reinstall the OS. Take this lesson I learned as a reminder to backup your computer (at least your important files) tonight or tomorrow. After all, you never know when you'll need it...