Misadventures with Mac and Mozy

First, a confession. This year I became a Mac fanboy. Yes, it's true. I purchased my first Mac in June. It is a 17" MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles — and I love it! 8 GB of RAM. 500 GB of disk space. A BSD shell. iPhoto. Parallels with Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubuntu Linux 9.04. Ah, Chirstmas!

Then two weeks ago I was greeted by a flashing question mark when I booted up. Okay, this is a Mac, it shouldn't be too bad. Hah! I did a quick search and found out that I needed to run the disk utility from the OS disk. So far, so good. The disk utility tells me, all sweet like, "you have an invalid b-tree node size." Okay, fix it. Now without compassion, "you must repartition your hard drive." What? Surely, you jest. Knowing this couldn't be right, I called the experts at Apple. They were on the side of the disk utilities, and had just as much sympathy.

I am not a complete idiot, I have been backing up my data on Mozy for the last five months. About 170 GB of data. My photos and music are safe . . . I think. I reinstalled the Mozy client and commanded it to restore my data. With all speed of children at work, Mozy began to download my files. Relax. Mozy, you can have the night; I am going to sleep with dreams of my data flowing back to my computer.

Ah, it wasn't meant to be. Mozy, knowing better than me, started a new backup, which of course, crashed the restore. Lesson learned. Bad Mozy. Preferences. Automatic backup off. Good to go again. No! Mozy hung three files into the restore. Argh! I started the restore again. No! This time, to bring variation to my life, Mozy was unable to keep a connection with it's all knowing servers and gave up — completely.

So, I went the rounds with Mozy five or six times with similar results each time. I even said pretty please and asked it for just a few files — "no soup for you!" I was on the ropes, but I remembered the good people at Mozy had a second option for restoring. Through the web. I was almost out for the count when I had to wait thirty minutes just to see my files so I could select which ones I wanted to download. Hanging in their, I selected the files to download and . . . nothing.

The next morning I received a lovely email saying my files were ready to be downloaded. Awesome.

When I returned to the website, I was greeted with 119 individual downloads. Breath... Breath... Breath... Okay. I started downloading and combining the files. Yet again, Mozy, protecting me from myself, made all of the directories read-only.

So here I sit, downloading files, pondering life, changing permissions, and . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . KO.

If you know where I went wrong, first, I hate you. Second, I would love to know. Thank you.