Mac troubles

I’ve been a happy Mac user for more than three years now. During that time, there has been seldom any issues with the computers, and compared to the Windows experience, using computers has been a bliss.

Until yesterday evening. When I woke up my MacBook Air from sleep, it was extremely slow, like it was running in 10% of the power available. Finally, I had to do a hard boot on the laptop. It was still slow, so I had to boot it again with the power button. Then it got itself in order and was its responsive self.

This kind of incidents, of course, make me worrysome for the data. I’ve been backing up my laptop with Time Machine, and I plugged in the portable hard drive as soon as possible. The backup took ages. I finally left the computer to do its magic and went to sleep. Only to find out that the backup had failed.

I’ve continued my sage today, running Time Machine almost constantly — it is still running, and it is almost midnight. The computer slows down now and then, but the backup seems not to go anywhere. And being an Apple OS, there is not that much of helpful information on the Time Machine dialogs. It is either “preparing backup”, “backing up” or failed.

I need to dig up some more data, and try to pinpoint the failure. Until then, I probably left the system to run the backup every night until the problem is found, or the backup succeeds.