A comment got to me via friend mentioning why am I suddenly so negative about Apple and Macs, which quite surprised me. True, I have had some serious hardware issues in first two weeks of June, but this negative event was about as much positive experience as hard disk crash can be. Thinking back what I have learned and discovered from this: - Time Machine actually works - it pays to plug in the firewire disk with Time Machine backups every day - the two second operation saves a lot of time in long run

So, after few days working diskless, I am back to normal operation mode. About time, we are late with last episode of screencast ... The copying of external disk went error free and took almost 5 hours (210 GB). Fortunately, the MBP was usable - I did not want to modify too many files, but it was perfect for Web research and writing in Google Docs. After reboot, the TimeMachine decided that 85 GB needs to be backed up again.

So, I have positive proof that the file system crash of last week was not a software problem in Leopard, but indeed caused by hardware failure. After restoring system from Time Machine, things looked pretty good - everything seemed to work. I was able to re-render the screencasts I have lost - I mean I have lost converted AVI files and MP4 files, not the "source" MOV files. I worked on Mac over Saturday and Sunday.

It happened on Wednesday afternoon. I knew something is wrong with my MacBook Pro immediately - when I saw semi-dark screen, unresponsive machine - even mouse cursor was frozen - and heard fans blowing full speed, making the strange, clicking noise coming from inside almost disappear ... OS-X does not freeze too often, but it can happen and as a matter of fact, I have seen it happen before during my almost two years with Mac, so I did not panic.