A Diabolical B-Tree Crash

It has been quite busy since I arrived in Taipei. I have been trying to pack paper research, PhD applications and rewrites of my statement of purpose, spending some time with Sayaka and preparations for next week’s conference all into my limited two weeks here.

Last night I began working on the powerpoint presentation (due today) for my talk at the conference this Friday when I got an email with some brutal, but much needed and appreciated comments back from my friend Jai on an early draft of my PhD statement of purpose and was just moving between Microsoft’s email application for Mac, Entourage, and Word when everything froze up and I couldn’t force quit anything. My computer is a Mac, this is not supposed to happen. We don’t have crashes anymore.

When I restarted the machine in “verbose” mode to read what was going on in the background as the machine starts up, I find that I have been hit with the infamous B-Tree corruption, and in all likelhood, my hard drive, and all of its contents are lost…As far as I can remember, this is about the 4th time I have had B-Tree corruption destroy my hard drive’s contents in as many years and every time it happened just as I was using Microsoft’s email application. The demons of Microsoft must, of course, be responsible for my ills, trying desperately to get me to abandon the outlaw world of Apple for the imperial XP operating system. Jai, who is a Windows user, is of course their agent, and was instructed to deliver the order to strike via the trojan Microsoft application on my machine…

Ok, so it is very unlikely that Outlook Express, Entourage, and Microsoft have had anything to do with my corrupted B-Trees over the last few years (Jai is still an agent though, and through his part-time tech support work in the last years has undoubtedly refined ways of keeping the clients coming by arranging for seemingly random technical mishaps). The fact that a high percentage of my time using the computer is spent working with email makes it statistically likely that I would suffer my destruction while using an email application. Also, the fact that I drive my computer hard, pushing its limits of memory and hard disk space, is probably the real causes of this. You are supposed to leave 10-20% of your hard drive empty and I rarely have more than 2GB free on my 60GB drive.

However, blaming completely unrelated calamity upon an evil empire is not without solid historical precedent, which I hereby invoke for my justification.

In the past, the need to “start over” with a new or reformatted hard drive has meant the loss of months of email as I dig up outdated backups, and is always accompanied with subtle changes in the applications I use, the way I configure my machine, etc. Each time it happened, however, I have gotten better at keeping backups and this time I fortunately made backups of my most vital files (400MB of emails and contacts from the last few years + website files and my notes from reading) just before I left for Taiwan. In addition, I have older backups of everything else which I make at less frequent intervals.

Now my computer in the hands of a friendly Taiwanese engineer named Michael at a place called “MacHouse” across the street from Taiwan National University on Xinsheng Nanlu. As I suspected, a hard drive replacement may be the end result of his efforts (no charge thanks to a 3 year AppleCare deal) or even more likely I will simply be told to reformat the drive and start over.

So, for the fourth time, I recommend to myself and everyone else to keep frequent backups of your most important files, don’t fill your hard drive to the brim, and when you need cheering up: blame Microsoft.