RANTS: Apple Migration Assistant

Just had (luckily) only my second user data loss in my IT career. The first experience helps guide how I operate with other people's data today. I can't have too many backups or can't be too careful.

Fortunately, this second experience was not a complete repeat of my first experience, though I definitely could have used extra backups here. I had a user who had a disk corruption on his MacBook Pro. Nothing I could to to recover, except reload the entire machine. I loaded a clean copy of OS X on an external hard drive. From there, I booted off the external hard drive off the disabled MacBook Pro. Then I ran Migration Assistant from the external hard drive and pointed it to the internal hard drive on the MacBook Pro. At this point, I assumed that the external hard drive had all the files from the internal hard drive. I wiped the internal hard drive. I reloaded the internal hard drive with a fresh copy of OS X. I connected up the external hard drive again and ran Migration Assistant from the internal hard drive to copy over all the files.

At this point, I figured I was just about done. I tested logging into a user account and reconfigured a few things on the new reload. User even logged in and found his files on the desktop he needed. A day or two later, he discovered that his mail was no where to found. Long story short, Migration Assistant did not copy over the contents of Mail at all. I checked the external hard drive and found nothing. All his mail inside of Mail was lost. I felt terrible, even if this user was quite understanding.

Now that I think of it, the hard drive corruption could have caused Migration Assistant to fail to copy over the contents of Mail. I, then, have to wonder how many other files were lost.

Yet another hard lesson learned. Don't rely on one process. Even the method/solution should be backed up, not just the data.

(Not so) Happy Computing.

Update: 10/28/2010, revisiting this machine, I figured it that it wasn't my fault that the data did not come over. Migration Assistant failed due to the drive corruption. Granted, I should have checked it before wiping the drive and reinstalling. The way I found out was that the user did a search on the freshly rebuilt OS with migrated data and found some of the messages he needed. Turned out the messages were moved over to a folder at the root of the drive probably because the messages were sitting in an area that was affected by the corruption. The folder was actually created by DiskWarrior when it attempted to recover the original build. Whew!