screwed.

yesterday evening, i wanted to grab a few cds. while cdparanoia was running, i copied a text file to another place. then, i noticed that the content of the copy was garbled. a quick check showed that the content of the original file wasn’t. tried it again, the same result. and again. then, i stopped cdparanoia, and after that, copying worked. well. after restarting cdparanoia, copying still worked fine. so i stopped thinking about this and continued working – which was a fatal error.
this morning, when i turned the macbook on again, the desktop was pretty garbled and the dock was at the wrong position and had the wrong size and the wrong content, i.e. everything i changed since i first got my macbook was gone. moreover, skype wanted to know a user name and a password, and adium seemed to have forgotten a lot of things i taught it, too. after starting the terminal (which is not so easy to find, if it’s not in your dock) i quickly checked some files i created yesterday – all garbled! what the heck. the older files seem to be ok. after some more trying around, it turned out that some other files from yesterday evening (namely, the music which i ripped) was fine, too. so, what happened? i don’t know. well, most of the files which were garbled i had backuped on the institute’s server, so that wasn’t a problem. but there was one file, called termine.txt, where i collected all appointments for the next months, which i changed yesterday evening and which i created in the last few days in long hours, and which i hadn’t backuped yet: now it’s garbled, too. screwed.
well. i don’t know what happened or whose fault it was. but for me, garbling data is something which an operation system should never ever do. well, good for me that i ordered a thinkpad yesterday, so i’ll switch back to linux soon anyway, hoping it will be less annoying… after all, all big data losses i had in the last years, which weren’t related to dying hard disks, happened on osx.

well, after this rant, something more constructive. one thing what could have happened is that for some reason, something screwed up with the realtime disk encryption i enabled on the macbook. maybe, for some reason, a screwed up dma transfer (maybe initiated by cdparanoia?) somehow managed to screw this up. just guessing.