shownotes_20140525

Opening
  Disaster in one form or another is inevitable
    That was brought home to me more than once in the past few weeks
    Fires threatened my area and possibly my home
    Then a logic board failure on my Mac
  Technical and non-technical failures
    Theft or natural disaster
    Failure of components
Managing Failure
  Preparation
    These are the kinds of things that need to have advanced plans. There is no time to do it during or after the fact.
    Backups for your Backups
      Time Machine, Super Duper, Chrono Sync, and Crash Plan (off site).
      Consider an "emergency" pack for your electronics with extra cables, cords, power supplies. That way you can just grab and go on hard drives and computers.
      An off-site solution is critical in case of theft, out of town, not enough time, or just too dangerous to try and grab your gear.
    Going paperless
      I am now scanning 100% of my critical paperwork
      Goes into paperless and is stored in an encrypted disk image that is part of my backups.
      We also have an emergency "briefcase" file for critical docs. Insurance policies, birth certificates, social security cards, etc.
    Know thy passwords
      I have all mine in 1Password which syncs with Dropbox and is in my backup schedule.
      I know some people who will have a printed copy in a safe deposit box or other secured location.
    Have a partner
      Make sure a spouse or parent knows your systems and how to access and use them
      This is key if you are injured or unavailable
  Diagnosis
    This is fairly obvious in the case of theft or physical loss
    What about failures. Crashed hard drive, failed logic board, etc. i.e. Mac won’t boot.
    Mac locked up
      Wait it out. Go have some coffee or something.
      If it’s not responding, press and hold the power button for 5-10 seconds until it shuts down
    Reboot
      It’s amazing how sometimes just a restart can fix things
      After it’s back up, then look are error logs, run Disk Utility, etc.
      Also consider running a tool like Onxy or Cocktail to clean out system logs, caches, etc.
    Won’t Boot Up
      Disconnect all accessories
      If you are having wake from sleep issues, fans running on high a lot, power issues, try resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)
      If you have 3rd party memory installed, remove and replace with original RAM
      Boot into Single User Mode and run 'fsck’. Hold down Commend+S on startup.
      Try booting into Recovery mode. Hold down Command+R on startup
    Will boot in Recovery
      Try running Disk Utility. Once started up, choose 'Disk Utility'. Then check and repair your boot drive if necessary
    Other tools
      Disk Warrior
      Drive Genius
  Service
    If none of the usual stuff is working, then contact Apple or local Apple authorized service center
      Even if you don’t have AppleCare
      They can give you a quote and let you know what to do.
    What if they need to take it in?
      You have backup, right?
      Be prepared that they might replace your hard drive and to give them your admin passwords
        If you have private or sensitive data and if you can remove or protect that before you go in for service.
        Change admin password, so you don’t have to give them your private credentials.
      Remove any 3rd party upgrades, in case they need to replace the parts
        I got my RAM back, but there was no guarantee
      If you’re lucky it might be something simple and they can do the repair on site. Or better yet they replace your device.
    Loner or temporary machine
      Business owners can join Join Venture and get loners if repairs take more than 24 hours
      If you’re lucky enough to have another Mac in the house you can use a bootable clone or restore from backup onto the other Mac.
    Using backup data on different Mac
      Depending on the backup it may or may not be 100% in sync.
      May want to turn off existing backup schedules. (Clone, Time Machine, Cloud)
      Set up new "temporary" backup schemes while your Mac is being serviced
        I used a dis k image on my Drobo with a Super Duper clone.
        Extra hard drive for Time Machine?
        I also let my Crash Plan and Chrono sync continue to update
    Different hardware might has issues
      One I found was that many items are tied to the hardware ID
      My iCloud account had to be re-authorized.
      "Inherit" Time Machine backup, you can no longer use with the old Mac.
      Many of my apps wanted to be re-registered.
      If your back wasn’t 100% current then you need to be aware of out of sync data
        In my case I hand copied some of my critical folders from a more recent Time Machine backup
        Simply browsed the Time Machine’s Backup.backupbd/[Computer-Name]/Latest folder.
        You could also use Migration Assistant to restore to a temporary Mac, assuming it’s not being used for other purposes.
  Recovery
    So what do you do once the repairs are done and your Mac is back?
    Basically a lot of the stuff you did to set up your temp Mac, but in reverse.
    Clone from temp backup
      If your repaired Mac still has it’s old HDD
      In my case, because I was booted off a temp Super Duper clone and all my updated files were on that, I simply cloned back.
      If you were doing a Time Machine backup of the temporary Mac then you could use re-install OS X and recover using Migration Assistant
    Starting from scratch
      If it’s a new Mac or new HDD, then re-install the OS and recover from backups.
      If your only data is on remote backup, like Crash Plan, then it will take a while to download all the old data. You might consider their "Restore-To-Door" service
    Re-enable things
      Again you might need to re-enter iCloud passwords, software licenses, configurations, etc.
      Re-enable any old backups you temporarily disabled and confirm they are working again.
      Check syncing services like Dropbox.
      If you use DHCP reservations then those may need to be reset
Closing
  Disasters suck no matter what, but being prepared can make things less sucky
    It’s pretty easy, with a little advanced planning, to set all this stuff up.
    Once you’ve done it, it is pretty easy to maintain.
    Don’t forget to review your plan too. Update if needed, maybe once or twice a year is probably sufficient.
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