SEEDlings

Last week I was working on a laptop trying to “unsync” it from our network. At the Center, when a laptop comes into the office the server gets all excited to see it’s old friend and syncs the laptop with a copy on the server.

It’s awesome! Someone has a machine go to out for repair after say dropping it in a parking lot. You grab the spare and login in at the office presto chango your stuff is back. Very handy.

Unsyncing a machine is a bear, which gets to the point of this post. My uber geek friends (Daryl from Apple and Sean Tennant) hadn’t attempted this task, so I was a bit out of my depth.

As I worked my way through the problem I found myself in NetInfo manager deleting line after line of instructions. I was almost home and misclicked. Said yes, to the “Are you sure?” and deleted the user account. The machine ran for awhile, but it was a chicken with it’s head cut off. Running slower and more unpredictably by the CPU cycle.

Thankfully, I had backed up the data, backed it up again, and hide some stuff in a .Mac account. When back up one failed. I was still able to completely reconstruct the machine without having to resync it and have the initial problem all over again.

The lesson and the ultimate point of this post. Please back up your data today. Not today, more NOW!

Happy computing.