Monday at 9:15 a.m. eastern, I will find out whether this is going to be a good week or a bad week. My MacBook Pro died on Sunday. My brother in law — a managed service provider who takes care of Apple servers — tried a range of remote trouble-shooting tools but couldn’t revive the system. Now, my best (and last) hope is break-fix support from the Apple Store’s Genius Bar on Monday morning. But I’m not in panic mode.
The good news: I back up my MacBook Pro’s important files on a weekly basis. And generally speaking, my most important applications — including our blogging system — live in a cloud rather than on my Mac’s hard drive. Now the bad news: My email backup is a bit out of date. So, I may wind up apologizing to quite a few folks for lost or unreturned messages. You can bet I’ll change my email backup policies going forward.
Ubuntu Saves My Weekend
Still all is not lost. I’m blogging away tonight using a System76 laptop running Ubuntu 8.10. It looks and feels like a Wintel laptop — without the security, performance or reliability hassles associated with Windows. I highly recommend it. And a memo to the System76 team: I promise to return the laptop Monday night. I know it’s overdue.
Meanwhile, I want my MacBook Pro back because I depend on Apple’s iLife applications to edit podcasts and video. I’m hopeful Apple’s Genius Bar will deliver another miracle and fix the system for me.
I’m continually impressed by Apple’s simple online reservation system — which identifies key days and times you can sit down with a Genius Bar representative. And my face-to-face support experience in Apple Stories across the United States has been spectacular.
Will my luck run out on Monday morning, when I step into my local Apple Store at 9:15 a.m.? Stay tuned.
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Posted In: Hardware as a Service
Tags: Apple Genius Bar | Mac OS X Managed Services | System76 | Ubuntu
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I find email is one of the most critical services. I work with many small businesses who could lose a workstation, laptop or even their web site and it would not be as nearly detrimental as losing email. This is one reason we are looking into adding Email archiving services to our managed services. Since we already maintain the servers, configuring them to archive email is relatively trivial and is a terrific added revenue stream for MSPs.
Jeff: You’ve got a point. When I got to the Apple Store I told them the single most important file I needed recovered was my email database. I’m almost positive that my email also lives backed up in the cloud — but I’m feeling pretty foolish for not being positive about that.
I do expect good news later today, though. My MacBook Pro is under warranty (as part of Apple Care’s three-year deal), All of today’s fixes — new hard drive, recovery of all data, reinstall of all applications — are covered under warranty. And the data from my hard drive was intact, despite the disk problems.
My MacBook Pro is critical to my daily work. Yet I didn’t lose any sleep last night because I knew the Apple Genius Bar would give me a complete assessment of the situation this morning.