Ya know, guys, for the first time in. . . ummm. . . well, since I got my first G3, back around '92 or so, I'm
really grateful for the habit of backing up stuff with Time Machine. I'm still using my G5 for writing letters and some other stuff (I occasionally have need of the OS 9.2(!) side of the partition, because of a couple of graphic programs that aren't available for OS X), and 2 days ago, I turned it on, and it just was wonky. The mouse quit double clicking, things were slow to respond, and when they did, they wouldn't do what they were supposed to. I repaired permissions, did a disc repair, ran Disk Warrior (worked for hours and did nothing;
my fault because I had forgotten that the old (V3.3?) wouldn't work on any version of OS X past 10.4 (?), and I have 10.5.8, so I held my breath, and did a "restore" for the complete system, after backing up my correspondence folder for AppleWorks and the music folder. I found that the last Time Machine backup had been from March, '14 (I'll do it more often from here out!), but since I don't do a lot on it, that was fine, and away we went. It was slow (a number of hours), because it was USB1 that it was working with, but it's all back and working perfectly, and I'm tickled pink. Lesson learned? Do the backups just a little more often!
It may not have been needed, had it occurred to me that I have the newest version of DW which
might have taken care of the problem much faster, but I had forgotten that it would have worked on 10.5.8 and newer, and both powermac and intel machines. . .
Guess I'm getting "old
er"!
Had this happened on the MacBook, it would have been a lot faster, but since the MB reminds me every 10 days, and it's USB 3, it's a lot faster! Ignore the rules of backing things up at your own peril!