Data Backup Scare

Yesterday, I did some "creative" de duping of my music resources. These resources are pretty much my sample library. At 21 GB its not the most vast library out there, but it DOES have some stuff in it thats irreplaceable. So I attempted to use a little used command called fdupes to sniff out and delete all of the duplicate samples in the directory. It went a little something like this.

#yes 1 | fdupes -dr /Volumes/Production/Resources

I'm pretty sure it did a far more thorough job than I had hoped. Evidence of this came when I launched Nuendo to work on a track and samples for my battery kit couldn't be found. I quickly decided, hmmm, I need to undo that de dup I just did :)

Enter my backup regime. It consists of a 2TB LaCie Firewire 800 External for local "oops" restores and a Back Blaze Account @ $5.00/month that holds around 900GB (and took 3+ months to initiate I might add.)

My first stop was Time Machine. I went in, browsed to the directory in question and hit Restore. This always just works right? Well it started to... It popped out of Time Machine and started the copy process and enumerated the 80k + files to restore... Then it asked me if I wanted to replace the existing directory I was restoring to.. I DID want to do that and responded accordingly... Then... Poof! the copy dialogue disappears and nothing. Okay.... I tried it again.. Same thing. Worse yet I looked to see if perhaps it was being stealthy and copying in the background, but nay... it had actually DELETED my entire /Resources directory.. *GASP*

After minor panic, I did my due diligence and visited Disk Utility to see if perhaps there were errors on the Time Machine or destination volumes... Hmmm... Nope everything came back Green (hours later.) A slow panic was creeping in.. I decided I had better initiate by fail-safe option with Back-Blaze, even if it takes days.. No Problem, they'll email me when their poor filesystem has zipped up 21GB of uncompressed wav files... Not holding my breath...

So at this point i'm dead in the water on a rare occurring Studio Sunday... Okay enough of this dumb GUI user crap, I popped open the shell.. Time to figure out how Time Machine works....

#cd /Volumes/TimeMachine///Production/Resources
#ls -lha


VOILA! My data IS there and just being stubborn... I fixed that promptly with:

#rsync -av . /Volumes/Production/Resources/


Away it went...... Minutes later everything was back to pre dup status.. Nuendo opened up, Battery loaded samples... and I'm back in action.... I'm soooo glad Apple used some common sense in building Time Machine.. While I still don't know why Time Machine isn't restoring from the GUI (and don't care now that I know I can substitute the CLI for all the stars and what not in TM,) I'm still quite happy with it overall.