Another Day of Mac Corruption!

So, to follow on from my post yesterday – I spent most of the night and until the early hours, removing ALL my photos, iphone photos, blog photos, documents, Address Book Contacts and the list goes on....... All items are copied twice on two external hard drives.

I then plugged in my third external hard drive to attempt the Time Machine back up again. Surely removing all those files would have helped to carry out the back up?

NO it didn't! It had failed again, when I got up at 8am this morning!!! Exasperated is an understatement. Basically, the corruption on the Disk Utility is not allowing me to back up my hard drive. I webmailed Liam, the Mac Engineer who I couldn't get hold of for a while. He suggested using 'Carbon Copy Cloner' to back up my mac. Because I had taken off all my important files, this allowed Liam to do a 'erase and partition' the hard drive (shrinking the size) – don't fully understand this, but this would mean that the Carbon Copy Cloner would have an easier job to copy the hard drive. Liam set this up (by screen sharing) and then waited – but it was taking so long, he said he would phone back in half an hour. Half an hour later, he phoned back and it still hadn't got very far. I said I would webmail him when it was finished, but it carried on all afternoon.

Liam finishes work at 4.30pm – by webmail, he said we can't do any more until this is complete 'We will need to let the process finish before we can continue, cancelling the process/turning off the machine etc may cause damage to the drive which we want to avoid at all costs....' So that mean't I wouldn't be able to continue with this massive job, until Liam is back at work again tomorrow (Saturday) at 8am. As I type at 22.40, its still not finished 'shrinking'. I really don't know what is going on! Also I wasn't expecting to spend a third day indoors – but its looking that way. If its not sorted by 4.30pm tomorrow I'm stuffed, as Liam is not back at work again until Tuesday and works 8am-4.30pm, which is no good to me whilst I'm at work! So if I want to continue sorting this with him, I will have to wait until the following Saturday at 8am!!!

If my blog posts and normal daily bird news does not appear over the next few days, you will know that my MacBook Pro has died, so bare with! I'm not insured for 'accidentals', so don't know what will happen regarding buying another. I will pray that this 'partition' completes overnight. If it does, which is not looking good, but IF it does, we then have to Carbon Copy Clone my hard drive and then take everything off the Mac and re-install the disks and all programmes that were on there and printer connections etc etc. EXHAUSTED AND FED-UP!