Backups are good. Of course, the problem in this case can be attributed to pure, stupid human error. Observe the process: Months ago, my machine crashed during an OS update so we had to scrape it and reload everything. We decided to partition the hard drive. We allocated 5GB to OSX and 15GB to everything else. A week ago, I noticed that my system partition was nearly full. I poked around but didn’t see anything that I could safely move to the other partition. It just all seemed to be necessary OS stuff. I started checking on OSX-related websites, and discovered that most recommended you allocate at least 10GB to the OS partition. Oops. It’s impossible – as far as I can tell – to adjust partition sizes on a Mac without scraping everything. Shite. The Snook reckoned that I could move my /sw/ directory to the other partition, which is the big Unix-software one that contains the GIMP (and MySQL, though we didn’t remember that at the time). I told him to do it. So he made a backup of the old /sw/, moved it to the new partition, and made all these symbolic links or whatever to it. Fine. I tested the Gimp for a week and didn’t have any problems, so on Saturday I asked the Snook if I should delete the backup /sw/ directory on the old partition. He said yes. “sudo rm -rf /sw/” Huge mistake. Neither of us realized that MySQL, which had been running for the past two weeks, was continuing to write to the old location in the backup directory. When I deleted it, I trashed all the changes that I’d made. I didn’t realize this til I went to look at the site last night and realized MySQL had crashed. (Of course it had; I deleted it.) When we restarted it, it started in the new location with the tables that existed when it was copied over. My changes were completely gone.I can’t even begin to describe how stupid I feel.

10GB for OSX……and I though WinXP was bloated 😉