noinput.net

Ok, I have to say this. Time machine for Leopard is fun to screw with, but I’ve never had to hit that “Restore” button until today.

I had just gotten off one of those long & boring calls with a client that doesn’t appreciate how much work it takes to “be a programmer” and just wants everything for free when I realized I’d just lost an hour of my life & hadn’t finished my coffee when the fun began. Jumping into the email’age to followup on a few things, that’s when I noticed that about a year’s worth of sent email had just “vanished”. My first thought of course is that somehow Gmail got out of sync with my email client and a quick resync would fix the problem, but nope, nothing. So I started to panic a bit and went into the actual Gmail interface to see that email was missing from yesterday through April of last year. immediately cursing and the slamming down of my now-cold cappuccino followed when it dawned on me that i just bought the time capsule last month and it’s been doing its thing for about 2-3 weeks. So i fired it up, went back a day to when the email was still there, clicked on my Gmail -> Sent outbox and it told me “Click restore to recover email from Gmail’s Sent folder”.

Fair enough, so like the sucker I am, I hit restore and it started doing it’s thing. About 5 minutes later it launched Mail & threw this little gem in the bottom of my folderlist. I clicked it and whallah, a complete archive of everything in my Gmail sent folder, complete as to that point in time. Right now it’s all syncing back to my account, and hot damn it actually worked.

Now you’re probably thinking big whoop, you can do that in outlook with a PST and it’s easier or you can just copy the whole Mail db from an archive. Yea, true, but the fact it threw everything at me so i could just drag and drop them back into my IMAP folder is the timesaver, and the brainless part. I’ve got about 9500 sent emails since early 2004 when i setup my gmail account. Seeing as I didn’t feel like syncing all that back to the gmail server today, and i didnt have to go find a backup, i literally found the spot in time right before they were deleted and it all was brought right back.

Tell me that’s not pretty awesome.