My hard drive crashed this week, while I was in Atlanta, one thousand miles away from my Time Machine backup. The Apple Store Genius Bar gave me a fresh OS X install. From there I downloaded 1Password and synced it to the database on my iPhone. Using 1Password and email, I was able to recreate my work environment of Terminal, TextMate, Transmit and VMWare Fusion + Linux without my backup. When I got home I restored the rest of my files from Time Machine.
Yes, I know that backing up to the cloud would solve all of this problem. But that’s still a bit expensive, and what I did worked fine. I also found a trick to make it a little better.
I now have a Recovery directory that contains the following soft links
- 1Password.agilekeychain
- LogicBlox.tmbundle
- LogicBloxOpenVPN.config.conf
- Settings.textexpander
- dot_bash_profile
- dot_hgrc
One command can copy the link contents to the SD Memory card I carry on most trips.
cp -RL . /Volumes/DAN_512/
Now I don’t have to suffer without my syntax highlighting and shortcuts.
Sounds like dropbox would have been helpful in this situation – no need to sync 1Password to the iPhone, and you could keep all those soft links in your dropbox and retrieve them without having to remember the SD card. Oh, and it’s free :)