I was pleasantly surprised on answering the phone Monday afternoon to hear that Miami Steve was repaired and ready to come home, the work having taken only three business days to complete rather than the stated seven to ten. I wasn’t as lucky as I might have been as the techs couldn’t save any of the files from the crashed hard drive, but this was not to unexpected.
Firing the machine up everything seemed in order so I began the process of reinstalling all the software and restoring my data. First thing I found was that my backup process had a few holes–none resulting in terrible losses but a few small Rails projects and miscellaneous documents gone and also I couldn’t remember every last application and utility that had been installed. One change I made already is to keep all the downloaded application files for future reinstallation needs.
More significantly, Ximeta NDAS Mac drivers are still in beta three months after I first got a copy. Because of this they are not posted for download but one must request them via email and I didn’t get mine in before they left for the day. So while my backup files were in place, I couldn’t directly access them! I found a workaround, using the connection TS1’s Windows PC has to the box, but it was incredibly s-l-o-w.
The gnarliest problem was bringing iTunes back in sync with Thunder Road, my iPod. Not the music files, they were all on the Ximeta drive, but the playlist which controls my workout music. Apple’s support website was really no help at all in finding a solution–don’t even think that this scenario is covered in the user manual–but I did find some inexpensive or free apps that helped.
The one which really did the best for me is Senuti, a GPL project developed by Whitney Young, which was the one of the three that (as far as I could tell) would recreate the playlist and not just copy the songs. Of course after Senuti did its job iTunes insisted on erasing and resyncing the entire set of files, but what the hay.
BillSaysThis 