ON the 24th of October my Time Machine hard drive stopped backing up.

I didn’t realise for over a week because I assumed it was all fine. The gear was spinning every hour, but I didn’t notice that for the whole spinning period, it was ‘preparing’ and not backing anything up.

Consequently, on the 4th of November I hadn’t backed up for over a week and things started going strange. Spotlight tried to index the drive every time I booted up even though it was excluded in System Preferences. Then Spotlight completely stopped working. I tried to repair my Time Machine disk, and it failed to repair.

After this, Mac OS X (the darling) gave me the warning that the drive was failing and to back up everything on the disk and reformat it. This of course sucks, because my backup drive is in fact my only backup apart from the original copy on my drive.

But, what can you do?

I took all the files that weren’t on my internal drive (I also keep movies and podcasts on there) and moved them to a separate portable harddrive lying around and completely wiped the drive.

Gone was all my Time Machine backups from the last however many months, gone were the piece of mind I had that I wasn’t going to lose any data, but the drive is completely fine.

I’ve stopped crying, but I want to know what happened in the first place to make the drive crap out from the formatting perspective.

I suppose I’ll never know, but the moral of the story of this:

Sometimes tech will fail on you randomly without any rhyme or reason, and you have to make sure that you have the resources to either troubleshoot it or recover from it effectively and without losing data or money.

- Adam