Back That Ass Up...

I'm blogging from the Apple store right now killing some time. Its a long story.

My Treo 650 crashed on Thursday.

I'm not sure what happened, but it ended up in an endless loop of resetting itself never reaching the main page. I did a soft reset which stopped the endless looping, but froze me out of my applications. Anytime I tried to get into my applications it would go into looping re-set mode again. I tried a system reset and a warm reset (basically I didn't want to do a hard reset and delete all my data), neither of those worked.

Ok, hard reset it was going to be.

Only problem, I hadn't backed up my treo in like two months because it takes so damn long (I have to hold the cable just right for it to start, like resetting the old 8-bit nintendo, I think I even blew dust off the cables). I thought, even though I can't get to my applications I can still hot sync my phone, back up my shit then do a hard re-set and restore all my data from my iMac right? I tried to sync and it actually started up, but then cut me off becuse I needed to delete files to continue. My smart phone was so bloated it wouldn't sync. But I couldn't get to any of my applications and delete the pics and movies that were probably clogging my phone.

Hmm...I deleted my entire call log and all my text messages ands tried again. No luck, still too fat a phone. And I couldn't figure out how to get to a delete-files option without going through apps which would just reset me again. I thought about e-mailing Palm, but every time I've asked them shit like this in the past they've told me just do a hard reset and I didn't want to wait a day. Maybe there was something else I could have done, but whatever. At this point I needed my phone working again so I just bit the bullet and went through my calendar and contacts and manually made sure anything important on my phone was also on my computer so I could do the hard reset and restore my information. God, I've got to be better about backing up. So I resolve to move my shit permanently to my new MacBook so I can just sync by Bluetooth and not have to pray for my USB cables to work.

I start looking at Missing Sync so I can move over to my MacBook and use iCal and stuff (I'm getting tired of Palm Desktop, its clunky and I hate Entourage, which we use at work) and then all of a sudden my MacBook freezes and I get ordererd to do a hard reset of my computer. I restart and the same shit happens at different intervals. Sometimes I get to log into my user account, other times I launch an app but same shit,it freezes and I have to restart. Now I'm shitting bricks, I never had my jobs' IT guy put my MacBook on our back up schedule (we use Retrospect) thinking I'd be fine. I've got all my work filed on there not backed up and I’m going through crazy job transition so if I lost my files I’d have been fucked. I didn’t know how long my computer would be working for so I looked for something to back up to. I lent my iPod to a friend so I couldn’t use that, I burned some CDs, but my work folder is too big for CDs so I ended up running to Radio Shack and buying a way-overpriced 4GB USB drive and backing everthing up onto that. I plugged it in and I prayed my MacBook would stay on long enough for the files to transfer, which it did.

I’m an idiot, I knew that some of the earlier MaBooks had had shutdown problems (including a couple of my co-workers) and even though I got mine recently from my job they had actually purchased it much earlier. Once I backed everything up I started reading online and found out what a widespread problem it is. It looks like its probably has to do with the heat sink. I even found another guy's blog who highlighted a numerical range of MacBook serial numbers that this problems is likely to affect. Of course mine was smack in the middle.

I'm lucky, I'm at the tail end of the warranty period so hopefully I can get this shit fixed and the genises at Apple won't give me any bullshit. This has all been quite scary. Back up baby, back up.