Wednesday, September 19, 2012

A Life A New

On Monday, 17 September 2012, at 1130 hrs, I was performing a routine maintenance on my Mac Book Pro's storage and decided to reduce the large storage used by Time Machine on both the laptop as well the 2TB LaCie Thunderbolt drive. Time Machine utilises a great deal of cached space on the main machine, and in my HDD, took up more than 700GB in various time slices.

Granted that I could afford to retain what already has been stored, my focus was to free up any unused space on the LaCie and do some automatic disk maintenance. I was perhaps too Windows PC-oriented... it does not work the same way on the Mac. In running a function in disk utility on the Mac, it immediately (and without warning) removed the partition within the LaCie and destroyed the HDD operating application, which immediately removed the device from my desktop. After consulting with Apple care personnel, the only recourse was to send the HDD back to the agent.

The problem with doing this was that all my content would be vulnerable to being hacked/copied by the agent themselves. We have all heard how content have always been copied by these technical personnel and eventually leaked out.

To be safe, all I could do was erase all my content on the disk by doing a reformat... and with that decision, my whole digital universe was erased. That meant all photographs and personal archives from 1997 to 2011, and 2012. All my Outlook PSTs from that time to last year was erased. This was made worse because during my Mac Book Pro maintenance that same morning, I had put the 2011 and 2010, and Starwood PSTs back onto the LaCie, and these were not backed-up anywhere.

All gone. Including my CVs and other business files, databases and such.

Then while trying to recover these, I continued to be aggressive about my removal of shared or duplicated files. The iTunes update on my Mac resulted in the iTunes in my Windows on Parallels being inoperative and while removing the file, it completely affected the Mac iTunes as well. Which to rebuild in from my iPod and iPad, I had to download and purchase the iExplorer app. Fortunately, the app worked quite well and not exactly to its advertised standards but with some careful thinking beforehand, I copied all the media files into separate folders and then only copied these back to the iTunes on my Mac.

All that effort and cost aside - I had already moved past the point of absolute grief and unhappiness.... after all, these are the direct result of my own actions, regardless of whether these may have been from ignorance or simply misunderstanding some of the technical lingo and paradigm built into the Mac OS.

But having been forced to let go of so much critical information and wealth of reference material including samples of my writing etc. I can only move on as if leaving my world of the past and taking on the future ahead with each present moment I live hence with a vigour and vision anew, all afresh.

So, this is now Day 3 of my new life... either told as one Walking Dead in Zombie land, or just one life, plain and unadorned. I could change my name now and simply be whomever I want.

Looking forward to Day 4 of my new life...

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