2020-05-08 (Friday)

@edwardhorsford Good tip, ta.

@alex_tea I've managed to avoid this so far, wanting to keep things simple, but one day...

@edwardhorsford Yeah, I've been pretty stingy with the size and cost so far.

@hostler It's a rabbit hole I've so far managed to avoid but it feels like my ultimate destiny...

@paulpod Yeah, true. I use Backblaze but I like having a second backup in case it misses anything. I definitely wouldn't be comfortable with only an online backup until we got a better connection than this 4G box.

@RichardYoung I usually assume they're on the brink. One false move and they give up.

@gwire @hondanhon Doesn't look like the drive wants to mount any more, so there we go.

@RichardYoung Good going! I seem to be averaging one drive every two years…

@hondanhon @gwire Same.

@hondanhon @gwire Yes. Is that the one with the funny rodents or the opera singer?

@adrianhon You and your modern USB-Cs!

@tedmills No, this time it was a more terse message and Disk Utility says "Problem -69842 occurred while restoring the original mount state."

@hondanhon @gwire Here's a test you could try: delete your Documents folder!

@adrianhon I've never bothered with SSDs for backup drives, but maybe they'd be more reliable...

@tedmills They seem fine… until the OS starts telling me it's broken. At least it tells me!

@gwire I occasionally get that "Disk not ejected properly" thing because I dared to move my laptop a bit, so maybe that's enough to upset it over time. One day we'll have the technology to cope with such unexpected events.

It sounds like DiskWarrior might be able to fix this unhelpful '69842' error, but that's 2-3 times the cost of a new drive, so here we all are and I'll see you at the end of the world.

Do you use an external drive for macOS Time Machine backups? What do you use and how long does it last? I've usually had Western Digital portable drives and they barely last a couple of years before they have some unrecoverable error. Seems such a waste.

@benbrown Morning!