History repeats itself – or, applying law of series to Computer Science ;)

Some time ago I had this, quite bad, experience of upgrading OS X. It ended with horrible disaster. I have lost all my data from my HD. As I am super paranoid about data and backups, loosing all my data was not a big deal. I always have my daily backup running (external HD), I have also NAS running all the time. So, generally speaking, first experience was close to:

Few hours later, after getting all the data from backups, I was at place before the crash minus Gigabytes of all unnecessary data :) BTW – I am still waiting for my download link from 65daysofstatic ;) I don’t have a backup of few mp3 from these guys.

Few months later I have decided to upgrade OS X once again. And, guess what ;)

Yes, that’s right. It happened again! I have lost all the data again during system upgrade. It sounds like some bad luck. However, again, my daily backups plus NAS saved my day.

Now, there is another disaster coming into party :) My NAS is based on FreeBSD. I have decided to upgrade it as well. I remember issues while trying to upgrade it too many releases at one go. I have faced few issues while jumping from 8 or 9 to 10.2. So, I have said to myself.

– No, not this time. This time I will be supper safe and I will do upgrades as soon as new major release is ready.

I think you already suspect what’s coming :)

Yes, I have upgraded my NAS by upgrading FreeBSD and I have lost it for some time. It turned out that FreeBSD made some merges of /etc/devd.conf and I was not able to start my backup machine at all.

So, just to conclude. All systems are really fragile. And, an advice. Do not ignore messages regarding merging config files. Double check whether they are merged correctly :)

My NAS, TimeMachine and yet another backup are running now fine. They are patiently waiting for another disaster :)