I am a relatively competent power user, and therefore I dislike most “PC tune-up” utilities that “clean your computer of viruses, scrub your registry ’till it’s sparkling, and speed up your computer 10000%”. However, my MacBook Pro’s AppleCare came with TechTool Deluxe (http://www.micromat.com/techtool-deluxe), which has since been discontinued. I also swapped my hard drive out for an SSD and my optical drive out for my old HD, giving me a moderately nice 440GB of storage. I ran TechTool this morning and it complained of file structure errors. Sure, TechTool Deluxe… go ahead and fix it. Can’t do any harm, right? Wrong. After running the repair tool, I discovered (to my shock and horror) all my files were missing. It was still reporting the same used space as last time, but… My files were missing! (duh duh duh…)
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I ran to get my 1TB My Passport with Time Machine backups of my life’s work on it. I’m a backup nut–I not only have the 1TB drive, but I have a 500GB offsite backup and a FreeNAS backup with 2 1TB (~350GB allotted to me) mirrored RAID drives. I tried to restore the volume directly from Time Machine, but Time Machine only restored the top level directories. So, with a sudden realization, I, I, I… Reformat my hard drive! That was a little bit hard for me. So, I used Carbon Copy Cloner (http://bombich.com/), a tool that has saved many people’s bacon. I clone from the latest working backup to my reformatted hard drive. Almost two hours later, I’m back to normal. But MAN, was that a scare.
