A few weeks ago my laptop (a 15″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display) had an unintended and very abrupt meet up with the floor. And of all places it could have happened, it was no more than a foot away from my local Genius Bar. I was literally still sitting at the Genius Bar. It not only damaged the screen and part of the GPU, but also dented the aluminum around the HDMI port. Luckily, the machine still powered up and worked fine if an external display was connected.
Not wanting to send my laptop to Apple with all my data on it, I elected to take it home, back it up, and wipe it myself. Arrangements could then be made to send it for repair.
I decided a normal Time Machine backup wouldn’t do. I didn’t want to have to deal with a different version of the OS coming on the machine, or anything else. I immediately knew what tool was right for this job: Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich. I’d used previous versions a long time ago, and used a more recent version at work. But I’d never used it on my own machine. I knew it worked. I had used it countless times at work on countless machines with no trouble whatsoever. But it’s different when its your own machine, and you’re backing up with the intent of purposely nuking your computer.
So I downloaded the free 30 day trial (I think I’m gonna buy it now). I tried my best to keep all the negative thoughts out of my head. I ran the backup to a disk image on my external hard drive. However, upon mounting it, I found there was nearly 10GB missing, when comparing the “space used” on the backup, and on my hard drive. CCC has a tool that tells you how much you should expect to see missing, and it told me I should only see a difference of about 1GB.
So I tried to do it again, but this time booted from an install of OS X on an external flash drive I made. This time only about 7GB missing. Still nowhere close to the 1GB difference it said I should see.
So I went out and got a 2TB external hard drive I could dedicate to the backup of my computer. I started backing it up. I started another backup run. This one would have the added bonus of being bootable, since it wasn’t a disk image. This time, I only had a 4GB difference. I read in a few places online that SSD drives and HDD drives could sometimes give different indications of space used when theres really no difference.
I also compared the main folders on the root of the drive (“/Users”, “/Applications”, “/Library”, “/System”, and the rest). They all had the same exact size. The difference was in one of the hidden directories (I think “/private”, which I didn’t modify anyway, so I could always copy it from a fresh install, with minimal problems.
Finally, I was satisfied. I then used a software called WinClone to backup my BootCamp (Windows 7) partition. That was not as easy to verify. It was significantly smaller than the used space, so there was definitely some compression and files being left out. The documentation does say that it leaves out things such as the hibernate file and caches/temp files, and the like. I kinda just had to trust it was backed up. I ran it a few times, just in case, and all backups had a similar if not identical file size. I used gdisk to backup my partition table, and “pseudo” master boot record. I also took screenshots of various commands in gdisk, diskutil, and a few others that pertained to the partition table (if I remember what those were I’ll update the post). I didn’t think I’d be restoring the partition table, but I thought it would be good to have just in case.
Then, while booted from my external usb, I wiped the SSD, and took it to Apple. One of my worries was that it wouldn’t come back with the same internals. Or that the differences would be enough to trigger Windows’ need to reactivate itself, which wouldn’t be a huge problem, just an inconvenience. I also was afraid it would come back with an AMD GPU instead of my NVIDIA GeForce 750M, as I’ve tuned my installation of Flight Simulator X to work well with the NVIDIA cards. Also, I had a few things that used PhysX and I recorded things with ShadowPlay, both NVIDIA-only features. A few days later, I got a call saying it was back and good as new.
I picked it up, and brought it home. I found out that they actually installed Mavericks (10.9) on it, although I had Yosemite on it before. No issues, I backed up (using Carbon Copy Cloner while booted from the external usb) the Mavericks install just in case. Then I restored my Yosemite install from the external hard drive, which was the one with the least difference in used space. Upon booting it up, I found that it still had an NVIDIA GPU, something I had specifically requested and was in the repair notes with Apple. I also noticed there was definitely still some space difference, but I didn’t see anything missing in my brief look. I haven’t noticed anything in the past few weeks either. I’m guessing it was just that stuff in “/private”, as my home directory was the same size as it used to be.
The next thing on the list was the Recovery HD. For some reason, Carbon Copy Cloner’s built in Recovery HD tools were restoring the wrong version of the Recovery HD (the flash drive I was booting from had 10.10.5, whereas my laptop had 10.10.3, and CCC was restoring the 10.10.5 Recovery HD). Luckily, I had made an image of the Recovery HD too. I created a Recovery HD partition, formatted as Mac OS Journaled, and then restored the image I made of it to the new partition. I had to change the partition type in diskutil from Apple HFS (aka Mac OS Journaled) to Apple_Boot, because thats the proper format for the Recovery HD partition. That’s why it doesn’t show up in Finder.
Then came restoring BootCamp. Instead of using the BootCamp wizard, I elected to create a partition manually, as it allowed me to make sure that it was the exact same size as the old one. That was successful too. Windows booted right back up and seemed to be none the wiser about the change in hardware if there was any (I think the GPU was swapped, but was the same model). Other than one piece of software (the Majestic Software Q400 add-on aircraft for FSX) having some strange behavior, which was fixed with a reinstall of that aircraft, the entire system seemed fine.
I learned many things from this experience. You can only be so prepared for something like this. REGULAR BACKUPS ARE A MUST IN ANY SITUATION. Although I had been doing regular backups, I only do them once every week and a half or so, but I didn’t want to lose anything I had done since then. So another backup, and this one being much more thorough, ensuring that nothing was missed, was a good idea. I’m glad I’ve got my computer back, and its good to have gone through this experience. I hope I never have to again.