Goodbye Happy Trees

If my title seems a bit strange, that's because I'm being a bit cryptic. Mac OS X was like Bob Ross, it made everything seem easy. But, even Bob has difficulties playing nice with everyone, and so too does OS X.

Mainly, I'm tired of juggling multiple different OS's in my household. I had Leopard, Windows 7 64 and Windows XP. At one point I also had Ubuntu, all in the same household, and they were all expected to work well together, but they just don't. Different file systems has made it difficult, nay, impossible to share music libraries, in any program, not just iTunes. I've become so comfortable with Mac OS X that I've forgotten how to properly fix Windows issues, and that means my old skills are waning. Plus, I won't upgrade to Snow Leopard knowing that the real improvements in the OS are all about architecture that my 1st gen Macbook doesn't have. And given that I'm too poor to buy another Mac ever again in my life, I figured I'd better get used to the cheaper alternative.

So, I spent a good long time reinstalling OS X into as small a partition as possible and using Bootcamp to give Windows 7 the rest of the space. It turns out this may not have been the best method because OS X default install was over 12 GB and requires 5GB of free space for updates which I needed in order to access Aperture 3 and my favorite Genealogy software, Mac Family Tree. So, I was forced to remove languages and other parts of OS X I didn't think I'd need right away to an external drive. It worked, but wasn't without it's problems.

The biggest problem I had, and the one that nearly stopped my heart, was from my attempt to read my Time Machine backup drive in windows. There's supposed to be lots of utilities to do this, but none worked as advertised. One program offered to read the drive using a different partition type, I thought maybe ExtFS was correct. Instead it rewrote the partition information and suddenly my backup, with all my irreplaceable photos, passwords, documents was inaccessible.

To say that I panicked might be an understatement.

However, there was hope, and it was free and worked better than anything out there. It was called TestDisk, and it could fix the partition type and MBR on any drive that was functional. It saved my bacon and I will be eternally grateful.

Once I got my drive back, I decided to use the OS X partition to extract my Aperture libraries and other Mac-only proprietary programs to something that could be imported by equivalent windows programs. I use the word "equivalent" loosely. I am still testing Media managers to determine the best software to roll out to all computers, as well as the best photo management and genealogy software. At this point I probably have 3 copies of my music, movies, pictures, and documents. I plan to keep it that way until I'm absolutely sure I won't need the extra copies and can go back to a simple backup. I'm glad I had the space, although it did require me to break things up between several drives.