Friday, November 14, 2014

A Couple Heart-Stopping Days

The younger members of my family have given me a hard time. It seems I have done something many people didn't think was possible. I made a MacBook Pro slow down. That, and this week I crashed iPhoto. I went to open iPhoto on Tuesday to do some updating and posting- and it crashed. It "unexpectedly closed." I tried everything normal (and abnormal) to get it running again. I even did the insanity thing- you know, doing the same thing over and over (trying to start the program) hoping for different results.

Then I went to the Internet for ideas. Did a couple of those- nada! I tried rebuilding through Mac programs. Mas nada! I set up a new library (option-start) and that go things working, but not with my library. That meant it wasn't the program which I already figured out, it was the iPhoto library and database.

In case you're wondering, it has been my pictures that have slowed down the MacBook. I have over 38,000 pictures- about 163 gig of data. Hence the heart-stopping- 38,000 pictures! Lost? Gone forever?

I am not one who has ever done a great deal of back-up with my computers. I have been working with personal computers for 26 years and back-ups have been, at best sporadic. Recently I have been using Dropbox for some of my important backups that I can use between computers, but 163 Gig of data is far too much for Dropbox use.

In these 26 years I have had two death-inducing crashes. One was the disk I had copied all the pictures from our trip to Spain. I went to load it and it wouldn't. I paid some good money to an IT company in the Twin Cities to get those for me. The other was when my desktop died. In that case, I had been doing most of my work on the laptop so the important stuff was saved.

Well, I must live right- either that or grace is looking out for me. A year ago I had bought a 1TB external drive. It sat around for a year, still in all its original packaging. Two weeks ago I decided it was time to do some housecleaning and make sure I had a backup. I made a complete backup through Time Machine. (Words of thanksgiving and gratitude added here!!)

So, I made a copy of the current, corrupted library then deleted it. With the space left I could restore the backup from two weeks earlier.

Voila, hallelujah, and pass the gigabytes! Currently, as I write this, iPhoto is rebuilding its library and thumbnails.

And I am breathing again.

Next step? Become more efficient about backups and see what I can do about the overwhelming size of my photo library.

No comments: