so... mac, take ii

Hi all, so about a year ago, I was here a LOT first asking tons of questions and then raving about my beeeeeeaaaauuutttiful new white macbook.

XBandAID and lots of others helped me get it all set up, which i did, but.....

less than a year later, quite randomly, i got the pinwheel of death. shut everything down and my beloved mac, well he never started back up. Then a clicking sound started.

Yes, I'm under warranty for three years, and yes, the geniuses inserted a new hard drive, and yah, i'm putting mac back together again and very much WANT to have the same love for macs I once did.

but...

1) what can cause a mechanical failure in one's hard drive? The answer seems to be... "anything."

2) Is there anything I can do to prevent this happening again?

3) What's the best back up option? (simplest, most effective)? Should I use the backup program that comes with mac and save to:
a) the web site (server space that comes with my .mac account)
b) an external hard drive?
c) both (and everything else I can think of?)
What's the simplest way to do this (in english)? all i seemed to have saved this way last time were preferences (contacts etc. which was good but.... all those files labeled backup76iorweior whatever made no sense to me, frankly.)


Now I'm super paranoid, so...

4) the audible fan noise, (whirring, and hot) is that a bad thing? any other warning signs to be on the lookout for? the last failure was like a heart attack - no warning as far as i could tell!



anyway, any other tips / empathy / general reasons why i should still love mac (even though my PCs ummm never crashed like this, 9 mos!) I'm taking a lot of abuse from all my pc pals who had to endure me bragging about mac.

Help!

 

External hard drive. You can find 160GB externals for cheap.

People almost universally learn to backup the hard way.

Hard drives are the weak link in the laptop. Slow. Prone to damage. Adverse to heat. And they don't like being knocked around.

FWIW, the hard drives in Macs and in PCs are pretty much the same. A hard drive failure is not really a good reason to fall out of favor with either platform.

 

Yup, HDD suck. I've had 3 go bad in my desktop/server in about.. oh, the last 2 years. And I'm pretty sure my 4th one is shot. They do go bad.

IMHO, if you have important data, that you CANNOT loose, then backup to an external HDD as well as keep an offsite backup location (either cd/dvd's at an office or internet server). there are some really good rates with hosting companies providing 250GB of storage (yes, storage, not bandwidth) for like, $10/mo if you sign up for 2 years (including lifetime domain reg.).

At minimum back up to a dvd or hdd. Preferably keep at least 2 backups of your data though. I've had backup drives go bad

 

I've lost a couple desktop hard drives, two laptop drives, and one iPod drive. The trick, you see, is to hit it while it's running -- this nearly ensures that it won't survive.

Backing up is good. Backing up twice (with one off site) is better.

I like backing up to an external hard drive or nas, just copying the files. It's fool proof (wysiwyg), and leaves out any worries of bugs in the system that can occur with the incremental backups and drive images. Maybe do this for an off site backup, and have an incremental backup for daily automated backing up, or something. Whatever works for you. The important thing is to make sure you back up, and make sure the backups are really there -- that you can really restore from them. (ugh. when I'm sleepy words get more repetitive. I'm not even going to try editing that. backupbackup.)

 

thanks everybody. I'm so grateful to have found drafts of both novels and some other stuff. but i'm uber-paranoid and overwhelmed now.

Question: does this have to do with the head. My laptop (using the smartfan reader someone here recommended is showing 6192 rpm and 75 C right now, just running firefox and itunes. Do certain widgets increase the temp.? Is there something I should be doing to lower the temp/fan?

 

As others have said, you cannot blame a HDD on a platform. Macs use the same exact hard drives as PC's. The biggest danger to hard drives is movement, which is why laptop drives tend not to last.

As for backing up get yourself an external drive and SuperDuper!. It is a great backup tool.

I am not certain what the temp in a MacBok should be, but that seems high. My MBP usually hovers around the mid 40's. I have 6 programs running right now and am at 46 with the fans a 2000 rpm according to iStat.

 

Firefox is the culprit, and I'd guess you're running some flash-intensive page (in fact Flash more than FFox is the culprit). There's not a whole lot of things you can do... Open activity manager and check if any apps or widgets are using more CPU than expected.

 

I had two HD's go bad on me, One from a Dell desktop, and one from my first Acer laptop. Now whenever my drive asks strange, the first thing I do is a Cluster scan. These scans take forever, but I know most bad clusters happen at the beginning sectors (from experience). So I let it pass maybe 10 Sectors only to save time.

 

The hard drive went bad on my acer laptop 10 times. Um and about 8 of those 10 times windows completely crashed on me. Stupid microsoft...so I got a mac. Who says you HAVE to use windows?

 

cluster scan? activity manager? thanks all for the very good tips and consulation/empathy but ummm forgive my dumbness.... where do i find these things?

 

bump. activity manager? again, forgive my cluelessness but... where? and... any good tools/utilities for cooling?

I'm at 58 C running just safari and quicksilver. thanks.

 

Remember that Spotlight is your friend. Activity Monitor is in Applications-->Utilities.

 

Mine's at 56C with just safari and a bunch of widgets running. I considered a laptop cooler last night when my CPU temp went up to 81C. NOT good. But I was watching videos on youtube and my room's the warmest bedroom in my house. Mine hovers around the 50C-60C usually for the CPU and high 40's to mid 50's on everything else...but it DID go down to 27C after falling asleep overnight.

 

Bill Gates and his death squads?