Have you ever had your computer crash and had to delete the entire hard drive and then re-install the operating system (OS) just to get the machine to be functional again? It’s the worst right? The computer is gone for at least a week while you have to pay someone to fix it. Last week my Apple Powerbook froze up like an Otter Pop, but this time I was able to entirely restore it’s software, files, settings, music, photos - everything - back to exactly the way it was before my OS became corrupted and unusable. I did it almost single-handedly and you can too.

The magic bullet was using SuperDuper - invaluable $20 software that copies mirror clones of an Apple computer’s hard drive on to any equal or larger sized storage device - I use a $120 external 120GB hard drive. Once you have re-installed the OS onto your broken computer you then simply ‘restore’ the backup clone onto your hard drive and just like waking from an awful dream, everything is just the way I remembered it. The other extraordinary benefit of using SuperDuper is that it’s maker, Dave Nanian, will respond to any usage problems within 12 hours and stick with you until you it’s resolved. For my PC I use a similar set-up using Acronis True Image ($40) as the cloning software. Hopefully restoring a clone to XP is as straightforward as with the Mac.

The one other person who helped me was Jason at the Apple genius bar. At every Apple store there are product experts - geniuses - you can reserve online for day-of appointments who do all they can to fix your problem at no charge. My genius spent 90 minutes with me confirming that my OS was hopelessly corrupted, and together we deleted the hard drive and installed a fresh copy of the OS. All at no charge.

Unfortunately restoring the backup clone onto my newly rebuilt computer did end up being nerve racking as it took about 6 unsuccessful attempts to move the entire data image, each try taking about two hours requiring successive hard drive deletes and OS re-install. If I had bought something other than the cheapest external hard drive I could have been able to actually boot my computer from the clone and been able to work directly off that version leaving me the luxury of getting to put off actually rebuilding my computer when I wasn’t in the middle an crucial work day.

So it took 2 days, but when my machine booted up and I saw my desktop pix of MGL and my machine just the way it was before the big freeze, I felt just like I had awoken from an awful nightmare safe and sound, quiet and happy.