My Terrible, Horrible, Awful, Really Bad Day

For several days I have been unable to see this web site. I thought it was down, but other people could see it and my hosting company, Pair.com, couldn’t find anything wrong. After a few conversations with Pair support, I tried my local service provider, Comcast. They said they would never block an individual site a wouldn’t even create a ticket. Comcast sent me to Apple. By the time I was finished talking with Apple, I had no Internet service at all.

To try to recover my internet connection, Apple support had me reinstall Leopard using something called Archive and Install. I’ve never used that install option and had no idea what was going to happen to me. That was the start of the terrible, horrible, awful, really bad day. (While waiting 3 hours for Leopard to install, I dragged out an old computer and found that I did have internet service, although I still couldn’t bring up this web site. So I called Comcast again and they finally opened a ticket. Maybe they did something, because here I am using the site.)

The archive type of Mac OS install turned out to be a horrible mistake. Everything disappeared. I had to call Apple again to find out what to do. And the solution for getting things back out of the archive and replaced where belonged was only partial. I had to reinstall software and spent a good 16 hours trying to recover to the point where I could work again. And the reinstalled software is, of course, missing any updates and fixes.

I don’t cry easily, but seeing what using the archive install of Leopard did to me made me want to cry. Why the hell does Apple even have such a terrible, horrible, awful installation option?

3 thoughts on “My Terrible, Horrible, Awful, Really Bad Day”

  1. Bummer, sorry to hear it Virginia. Whenever I hear of stories like this, I’m that much more convinced that the way to go regarding my computing life is to be Web based as much as possible. I’m almost there now, the big app being a Web based email which I shifted towards years ago. With Google Docs and the like paving the way, I don’t think it’s too many years down the road where the desktop computer will be nothing more than an access terminal — the software will all be on the Web.

    -Bob

  2. When I hear these kinds of stories, I get terrified. One reason I’m afraid to leave Blogger (besides the page rank loss, a big one for a recipe site) is that I would have absolutely NO idea what to do in a case like this.

  3. It’s almost two weeks later and I’m still dealing with the aftermath, but it didn’t really affect my blogs. It was only my local computer that was messed up. Luckily I’ve been using Time Machine lately, and that has really helped restore things like printer drivers and important stuff that just went missing. I’ve installed Mac OSes for 15 years or more to different machines, but I’ve never done that Archive and Install option before and I will never do it again.

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