I am not posing an episode of Crystal Blade today. I’ve been feeling increasingly crappy all day and the only thing I really want to do is crawl into bed at a reasonable hour and go to sleep.

On the plus side, blargh as I’m feeling, I did achieve something today. So I have a 500 GB backup external drive for my antique 2012 MacBook pro (don’t laugh, it still runs like a champ and I loathed the changes Apple made to the MBP until last year). Like any properly paranoid writer I like to leave the external drive plugged in and Time Machine running. That way, everything can be backed up daily in case of lightning strike, cat pee, or what have you knocking out the laptop.

Except that the backup drive stopped working about a month ago. I would plug it in, it would light up, I’d hear the drive start to run, then boom. Nothing. Couldn’t find it as an external drive or anything.

As I’ve been what you might call “busy” for the last month I kept thinking, “Yeah, I really need to take the backup drive to Ramón and have him troubleshoot it, see if he can get it working again.” And five minutes later an emergency would erupt and the thought would go clear out of my mind for days on end. My laptop, bless its heart, kept putting up reminder messages that I hadn’t backed it up for X amount of days and I really should do that, I’d remember that I needed to ask Ramón to look at the backup drive, and yet another emergency would crop up and I’d promptly forget about it.

Until today, when I was browsing through a friend’s FB page and she mentioned that she was having problems with her MacBook Air. A number of people offered helpful advice, chief among them, “Back up the machine and take it to a Genius Bar.”

Which reminded me that gosh, I really really really needed to have Ramón take a look at the backup drive. And then I thought, “Well, hell, I’m a capable techy woman and he’s sleeping right now—why don’t I take a look at it myself?”

So I did. Opened up the case—the connection between the drive proper and the plug was a little loose. Tightened that up, plugged it in … nothing.

While it was connected I opened Disk Utility to see if it could find the drive. Boom, it could, which meant that the mechanics of the drive were functional. I ran First Aid and found out that some of the settings had gotten embuggered in a way that couldn’t be repaired.

I thought about it, decided that there was nothing on the drive that I couldn’t live without, and erased and reformatted it. Set it up as the Time Machine drive for the laptop, told Time Machine to do its thing and voila. Everything is backing up again properly. So I’ve got that going for me.