You might also consider reading iBook: there's no logic or Silicon Graphics, Inc..
iBook: the backup
Regardless of what we’re going to do, the most important thing is to make sure that our data are safe — that’s what I woke up thinking at 5am this morning. So I got up and got to it.
First item of the day was how to get the display to stay on so I could access the data — the cause of the problem is apparently a situation where the video connection to the logic board is lost due to the flexion of the iBook. Our iBook is not completely rigid. If you were to pick it with one hand you’d see the entire body of the computer bend just a bit under its own weight. This is enough to severe the connection. For future avoidance of this problem, I’ll try and remember to use both hands.*
Twice I got the video to come on, and twice it froze minutes later. Believe me when I tell you that I was completely upset. (And I use the word “upset” in place of the words I really want to use.) I read on Macintouch that some people have had luck with “pinching” the body of the iBook along the left side and then restarting. It didn’t work for me. What finally did work, however was the following: I set the computer up on its display so that the body of the laptop (where the keyboard and trackpad are) was sticking straight up in the air perpendicular to the top of my desk. And then I rebooted the machine over and over until I got lucky — the display came on.
After logging in, I decided that the contents of my Users directory would sufficiently contain everything from the computer I would need. This had Jill’s account and all her files, my account and files, and the Shared directory which contains all of our digital photos. In order to back it all up efficiently to the iMac (our file and print server with remote login enabled) I decided to use rsync. rsync is a computer program that can make incremental backups of data easily and efficiently over a network. It can also be piped through secure shell (ssh) in case you are concerned about privacy issues on the network between the computers. A very nice tool. (It is also free and included in Mac OS X and most linux/unix variants.)
As superuser,
sudo su
I moved into the Users directory and used the following command to backup all of our data over the network (to a directory I had prepared on the iMac):
rsync -av -e ssh . [email protected]:/Volumes/Storage/ibook
or more generically:
rsync -av -e ssh source username@server:/destination
I had to verify my password on the iMac and away it went. Fortunately, it was 6am and our kids were still asleep — unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t string an ethernet cable into the wiring closet for fear of waking them up (creaky floors). I had to do the whole thing wirelessly — it took two hours; it moved 2.5 GB of data.
The great part about rsync is that additional updates would only be incremental — they would only move those bytes that had changed. This means that in the future, if the iBook lives on, we could keep that 2.5 gig up-to-date much more quickly. I should probably add it as a cron job… but that’s a big if!
* Honestly, I haven’t given this a bit of thought in the past because our iBook has honestly been the toughest sub-notebook computer I have ever seen. In the past two years it has taken its fair share of knocks and kept on going. So while I am upset that it is broken at this point, I do not hold Apple entirely to blame. Over the last two years we have gotten a lot of fair use out of the computer.
written by Kevin in web stuff