Acceptance…and bargaining

So I’ve been running my last-ditch effort to back up the data of my dying MacBook Pro. It’s been running for quite a while – along the lines of two weeks. I’ve been getting the sinking feeling that it’s not going to work – of course the big “I/O Error” messages I get lead me to that, but also the rate of copying bytes off the disk is dropping drastically. I assume dd (the unix command I’m using) attempts to re-read the bad data several times before giving up.

So here are my current estimates:

The problem is that the copy started really slow, then it rapidly ran through 70 some-odd gigs of data, now it’s slow again. So it’s hard to gauge what speed it’s actually running at.

If the amount of bytes/second that dd says it’s getting is accurate (76k/sec right now, but each report is slower than the last…) then it will be complete: January 23 2008.

Ow. And as I said, it’s not even likely that it will finish at that speed, unless another batch of ‘fast disk’ comes up.

And I just timed how long it took to do a single block. By *that* estimate, it’s doing closer to: 4.97 (what the hell, let’s be charitable and call it 5) bytes per second. Bytes, ladies and germs. Bytes. At that rate, it will take: 1163 years for it to complete.

So, needless to say, I don’t think I’m going to be doing *that* one. And, hell, the January 23 option isn’t looking that attractive to me right now either.

I’m not going to stop it now, but it’s starting to seem like I need to make sure my data’s affairs are in order. I may have to pull the plug soon, and get some level of closure on this horrible chapter, and onto the new.

But, see, there’s that little glimmer of hope I insist on holding on to – I haven’t cancelled the backup yet. Why am I doing that? Well, the answer is easy, I haven’t fully accepted it yet.

But if I were to wait until the January 23 timeframe – I’d be just as bad off as if I managed to recover all my data – the loss of 30 days or so. And that date is by no means assured.

So, maybe I’ll keep it running and the next time I find myself going to the shop, maybe I’ll cancel the copy and close up the laptop for good. Or maybe I’ll pointlessly cling on to this last shred of hope. I certainly hope not. I think it seems pretty obvious that it’s time to move on.