Intel Mac took a beating: still good!

[Van Isle]

Folks,
just wanted to report on my lappy: I left it on a supposedly secure perch in my hotel room in San Cristobal de las Casas (Mex). While out for a walk some construction down below really caused a hammering and made my lappy attempt suicide.

About 4 feet down to brick, right on the corner of the brick. Laptop was open and running I found her face down and immediately attempted CPR (on myself!)

Good news: seems to run fine after some finaggling. Wow! Bad news: I was using Filevault, Mac OS X's native file security stuff, and because of that all my stuff was subject to loss. Of course, I hadn't yet got around to backing everything up!

I recovered my journals (a month's worth so far) and some other miscellania. All photos had been backed up. My music is on my iPod, which incidentally is NOT a backup to your iTunes, i.e. you can't just plug it in and suck the music back to the laptop if your hard drive crashes or pseudo-crashes like mine. So everything important, except the music, is good to go.

Lesson: be extra, EXTRA careful with this stuff if you like having it. AND don't use Mac's Filevault if there is a chance your system could shutdown unexpectedly, like un-clean power, low battery, shake to the hard drive, etc. I never will again.

Cheers,
Mitch