Time Machine Misery

Yesterday morning and early afternoon, I was chugging happily along. I did some work on the issue tracker in Textmate, jotted some notes in Yojimbo, and created some new wireframes in Omnigraffle. It was a normal day until around 2:30 in the afternoon when my machine, a 15” MacBook Pro, inexplicably froze up while I was using Omnigraffle.

I was a little disconcerted because in my almost 3 years of using a Mac, I never had one completely lock up on me. Ctrl+Alt+Esc always worked. This time, however, it wasn’t having anything to do with coming back to life. Eventually, I gave in and held down the power button.

The Weirdness Begins

Upon rebooting, everything seems normal until I go to begin working on my Omnigraffle file again. It’s not there. I assume I just saved it to a different location. Knowing that I had saved as an early version for use as a template, I went to look for that version. It was nowhere to be found either.

A quick look through both my system’s recent items list and the Omnigraffle recent items list, there’s no sign of any files I had recently worked with for any programs I used that day. At this point, my concern begins to escalate. I check the issue tracker codebase for some work that I had done between 7am and 9am in the morning, and all of the code had reverted as well. Thankfully, I had Subversion to fall back on, so none of that work was lost.

The Weirdness is Confirmed

Now, I’m sufficiently concerned that something really odd happened. I check Yojimbo for some notes that I had added earlier, and the’re gone as well. At this point, all I’ve really lost is a couple of hours in Omnigraffle. I remember that Time Machine is supposed to help with these sorts of things, and scurry off to swim through the surreal interface.

Curiously enough, Time Machine completely denies that any of those files every existed. At this point, I’m starting to remember scenes from Rendition. More than anything, I’m just freaked out at how something like this even happens. I’m not sure why, but I hadn’t yet started to blame Time Machine. On subconscious level, I’m sure I was implicating it, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Until this morning.

The Revenge of the Weirdness

After reluctantly accepting my fate the previous day, I continued working and decided I’d just work a couple of hours later to make up for the lost work. I made some great progress on the new wireframes, and it felt like everything was back to normal. Just to be safe, I sent a copy of the file to my gmail account as an extra security precaution. My Super Duper backups are scheduled to run every night, so I wasn’t too worried about losing any work, but I wanted to be extra safe.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. This morning, after about 10 minutes of checking e-mail, my machine freezes again. Now, I’m really worried. I can’t live like this. So, with great trepidation, I force reboot my machine for the second time in two days. I felt so incredibly defeated.

You have to be kidding me.

After rebooting, I immediately go look for my wireframes, and sure enough, my new wireframes had been replaced by earlier, much older, version from before the original crash. I check Yojimbo and my issue tracker code. Sure enough, the entire file system reverted again to the state right before the original crash.

Now, the fact that it reverted doesn’t shock me at this point. However, the fact that it reverted to a state that did not appear to exist in Time Machine the day before really concerned me. Less than 12 hours ago, Time Machine told me these files didn’t exist anymore. Where did they come from? So, I go off to check Time Machine, and sure enough, it’s entirely unaware of any activity between the two crashes.

So, now that I’ve lost all of my wireframe work from the previous evening, I scurry off to Gmail to find the backup. Thankfully it’s there, but now I know something really unusual is happening. Once I calm down, I start thinking about it and assume that Time Machine is the only possible culprit that could be causing behavior like this. I turn it off, unplug the hard drive, and schedule some time later today with a Mac Genius.

The Retrospective

I still have no idea how this all happened. I’ve come out relatively unscathed, but definitely concerned. The only unusual activity I could think of was that Time Machine was being unusually persistent yesterday in trying to back things up. I told it about 3 times over the course of the morning to stop because the hard drive is irritatingly loud when it’s really working.

I’m not sure if the repeated stopping threw it off, but it’s the only thing I can remember that was unusual. I’ve had Time Machine hooked up now almost since Leopard came out, and it’s never given me any trouble, or reason to believe that it’s giving me trouble, until this. I’m still not quite sure that it is Time Machine, but I can’t identify any other possible culprit.

I generally don’t blog about technical problems, preferring to just vent via Twitter instead, but this one was sufficiently concerning that I thought it was worth sharing. As of right now, I’m giving up on Time Machine. I hate to cut out one of my layers of backup, but right now it seems to be causing more problems than it’s fixing. Has anybody else experienced or heard of anything like this? I’ll make sure to update the post if I learn anything at the Genius Bar later today.

Update: After visiting with a Mac Genius, and discovering in the log that explicitly shows that Time Machine deleted a backup at 2:22pm yesterday, right around the time of the crash. His theory is that the Time Machine backups became corrupted somehow, and this was Time Machine’s way of trying to recover. However, I’m not comfortable it’s that simple because it doesn’t explain why my internal hard drive was reverted as well. So, I don’t have any real closure yet, but I’m planning on making some adjustments to get things back on track.