Well, down in Bangkok and wasting time with this f@@@ing mac. With my Windows laptop I can buy an external hard-drive and have it up an running straightaway and find simple synchronisation shareware to use for backups. Fine, my new 400Gb external drive seemed to mount okay and the backup software started and chugged along (exceedingly slowly) so I decided to go out for dinner (hey, I’m on holiday…)
When I came back an hour or two later after a fine sour & spicy prawn soup and an equally fine prawn and cashew curry (from a street-side food place in ‘little arabia’, amusingly juxtaposed almost diagonally opposite to Nana Plaza, one of Bangkok’s larger ‘entertainment complexes’; veiled ladies in the street and bar-girls about to come on shift flaunting it from the balconies above, wonder what they think of each other) the external drive had vanished from my mac but the backup was still going on. Okay I thought, we’ll just see what happens. An hour later and I have a warning message saying my primary drive is almost full.
It appears that for some reason (power saving setting?) my mac had lost touch with the hard-drive halfway through the backup but then continued to write the backup to a hidden folder on the primary drive. Want to guess how long it took me to find and get rid of that 40Gb pirating my HDD this morning? It had also managed to trash the external drive to the point where it needed reformatting – thankfully I had only copied stuff to it that I have already backed-up onto DVD.
And halfway through the reformatting I get a read/write error and the disk unmounts again. Looking at Seagate’s website they say their disks can go to 60 degrees, I’m sure mine is getting hotter than this with hefty writing so maybe it’s a thermal cutout? So, one more try now to do a big back-up copy to the new drive, lets see what happens…
Another moan. What is the problem with sending mail using the wireless connection I’m on at the mo? I can receive messages but mac mail refuses to send anything saying my sending servers are wrong. No they are not – I know this you stupid @%%%@ of a machine as I was sending mail on the same settings 2 days ago from a Beijing hotel network. Even sending from yahoo’s mail site just seems to make my messages disappear. They certainly aren’t showing in the sent items folder so where the heck are the going? I can’t help but feel this wouldn’t have happened to me on my old PC.
Anyway, it’s raining outside so there’s no point in going anywhere…
About Me
- The Nomad
- Comming from the UK in the mid '90's The Nomad worked slowly through most of eastern europe and Turkey before venturing further afield to Mongolia in 2002. After five years, 30,000-odd km of 4x4 and 60-odd days in dodgy old helicopters he has seen the country from Olgii to Dornod and Huvsgul to Omnogov. Heartbroken to leave the stepp and the deserts (and his trusty landcruiser) The Nomad with wife and child in tow moved to Brisbane, Australia, in 2007. Currently his interests have ventured off-shore, searching for hydrothermal vents in the southwest Pacific - as different an environment to the Gobi as you could find on our planet.
No comments:
Post a Comment