A Cautionary Tale of Sad Computer News

A long post, and I won't blame you for not reading it to the end.  But there are some lessons that may be worth reading...

No, I haven't gotten a diagnostic call from the computer repair shop I mentioned in the last post.  Instead, I messed up my own working Mac Mini computer.

Over the past few years, I have tried out several anti-virus/disk management programs for the Mac, and not been really happy with them.  Viruses aren't really a problem for Macs, but they are good about detecting viruses that could go on to infect PCs that I communicate with, so I want to keep the anti-virus protection up to date.  Mostly, I want the programs for hard drive management and they are S-L-O-W.   Several hours to read all the files looking for viruses, and a lot of one-at-a-time decisions about most programs.

I like Macs, but it seems there are a couple of weaknesses.  They don't "hold" your name/passwords to some websites as well as PCs do.  So when I actually have to shut down the computer, I have to sign in again.  A minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but it does get tedious when you have several program updates the same night and have to restart the computer after each one.

That wouldn't be too bad, except that I play computer games that use adobe flash a lot.  For some reason, Macs accumulate some files than clog the system.  Even THAT's not too bad; on my older PC, I would simply crash in mid-game.  One the Mac, things afterwards slow down and it locks up while searching something on Firefox or writing a letter and I have to restart the computer (meaning all those sign-ins again afterwards).

So I found a program called MacKeeper that promised to do all that better and great hacking protection (and had good reviews).  And since I had just run into a person who I thought intended to do me ill (old story, I won't go into that now except to say never blow up at a former friend whose past malicious behavior shows they know a LOT about computers).

I used the program and it seemed to work well.  Fast scanning of all files, etc.  No problems with hack attempts.  A couple of nights ago, I noticed some additional features.  The were sub-routines to identify and delete unused apps, find and delete "leftovers" (orphaned files related to deleted programs),  etc.  It wouldn't just do it automatically, I had to check each file to be deleted.

After tediously checking boxes carefully for an hour, I got a bit casual and just started taking its advice.  You can guess that was a BAD move...  It was in the applications part of my directory, and just after I clicked OK for the latest batch, I saw Firefox was on the list.  It was too late to stop it!

I have to admit the program is thorough.  When I could control the computer again, I found I had deleted Firefox.  OK, no real problem, I have TWO backup systems.  One is an external drive called FreeAgent, the other is a built-in Mac backup called Time Machine.  Both save your hard drive initially and changes to it thereafter.

Well, FreeAgent had told me last week that it was full and I should delete some older backups, and I had just done that, saving backups from Jan of the previous several years and a quarterly one for this year.  I didn't examine The Time Machine (I find it a little confusing to use).

So I examined my computer dock (graphic sidebar of active applications) and Firefox was gone.  So was the Mac word and spreadsheet suite called iWorks.  So was the MS Office Word and Excel.  I have NO word-processing or spreadsheet programs, and the only browser I had was Safari  (which seems to fight me all the time).

After spending a good part of yesterday and this morning trying to find the lost programs in the two backups, I gave up.  I downloaded Firefox (at least its free), but there were no bookmarks.  I had about 13 years of some useful and unusual bookmarks saved.  Well, at least I knew that I had seen a boormarks.html file in the backup list.

Yeah, it was from 2008!  Both backup programs had faithfully saved one old bookmark file for 5 years.  I checked both backups programs "every way from Sunday" (as my Dad used to say) for 2 hours before I gave up.  There was just that old one.  So I imported it.  The first thing I did was open every single bookmark.  Most were no longer working and I deleted them.  Some were still working but were "repurposed" and I deleted them.  Some I could not imagine why I bookmarked them and I deleted THEM!

It didn't leave me with very many bookmarks, but at least I still had the organization of the folders (blogs, reference, hobbies, garden, pets, etc).  The first additions were my blogs.  And you know, it was hard to get those.  It was easy to SEE my blog, but it took some thought to find how to get to my dashboard (my blog has "blogspot" in the url, but the dashboard has "blogger").

I slowly used Safari to get the urls of some other sites (like cat blogosphere) and bookmark them into Firefox.

I've lost a lot of bookmarks, but I had too many old unused ones anyway.  Old ones I want, I can find again easily enough and bookmark them.  And my Feedly bloglist RSS is safe because I set it up as my home page on Safari (open up Safari, and there it is).

I had the Mac iWorks and MS Office word and spreadsheet programs downloaded rather than owning the reloadable CDs, so I think I would have to buy them again.  Fortunately, I don't need the MS suite programs with their advanced features anymore.  The simpler Mac Page and Numbers apps will work fine.  And it seems they are only about $20 each.  MS Office for Mac costs $140. (and I'd rather not have any MS crossover programs on the Mac for security purposes).  And I used to make CD backups of some programs, I might find them.

But not tonight!  I'm worn out and (as calm as I may seem), very angry and frustrated.

Those backup programs (as I understood them) were SUPPOSED to allow me to completely restore my hard drive in case of failure.  I HOPE it was just my fault in not setting them up properly, but my recollection is that I was pretty darn careful about doing it right.  But I'm going to really triple-check it when I dig into them both tomorrow!

If you have a backup system, I suggest you really examine it carefully.  Make sure that what you think is a saved program isn't just the sidebar graphic or the desktop shortcut.  Look at "properties" or "info" or whatever gives you file size amounting to MBs.  You may not actually have the actual program saved.

I got fooled because my older computers had a full-sized 2nd drive and when I copied the main drive to the 2nd drive it WAS a real copy of the whole drive, applications and all.  I was used to that.

It seems to me that, not matter how careful you try to be, a train wreck will occur on your computer every few years.  And something you assumed worked, won't work the way you think it will...