So I got to work and found my new T-Mobile usb umts stick waiting for me. Yah!  I didn't waste any time and unpacked it right away.  I plugged in the usb stick into my Macbook Air running Snow Leopard and the software installer appeared right away.  Very nice.  I installed the software and it worked like a charm right away.  "Not bad, T-mobile.", I thought to myself.  I was soon to change my mind though.

A few minutes later I wanted to rock out with a brand news rails project.  That, however, was not meant to be.  I ran a few commands in the open Terminal.  I tried to open a new tab and strangely, the prompt never came.  I closed Terminal and tried to start it again.  Nothing.  "Oh well." I thought.  "Time to restart the machine."

Hm... Why is my machine taking so long to restart?  Power down.  Try again.  Waiting... Waiting... With each passing second I was becoming more and more sure that this would not be a very productive work day.

Oh, crap.  I went home a little early that day and hooked my machine up to my external harddrive.  Since the Macbook Air doesn't have a dvd drive, I had made a Snow Leopard installer partition on my external harddrive.  I booted up the machine with that partition and in the utilities menu I tried to repair the drive using Disk Utility.  Restarted the machine.  Ughhh.  Didn't help.  Booted up again and this time I restored the entire machine from my Time Machine backup on the external drive.  I had another backup on my Time Capsule, but that would have taken significantly longer to restore over wlan.  

Ok.  After about an hour the restore was done.  This was the moment of truth.  Had my beautiful, new Macbook Air turned into a very light, yet expensive paperweight?  

...

Tada!  Time Machine saves the day!  Unfortunately, I've been gone the past few days for work and the last backup was 9 days ago.  I wasn't missing much but there were a few documents that I had created in the meantime.  Enter Dropbox.  All of my documents, spreadsheets and document scans are automatically backed up to the Internet by a magical little tool called Dropbox.  

Would Dropbox be smart enough though and restore those files I lost or would it just mark them as having been deleted?  Low and behold, Dropbox is not only super practical its also super smart.  It immediately began downloading the files that I had created in those 9 days that were missing from my Time Machine backup.  

Time Machine and Dropbox saved the day for me.  It took, all told, about 3 hours of work to restore all of my files and get my machine back up and running.  Without those two super tools, it would have taken me closer to 3 days.

As to what caused the blackout in the first place, I'm not 100% sure.  Either the T-mobile usb umts software bunked up my Snow Leopard royally or the SSD in my Macbook Air developed a back sector.  I'm hoping its the former.  Just in case, I'm not going to reinstall the T-mobile software on my personal machine anytime soon.  Before I do though I'm going to make sure I have a fresh Time Machine backup.

Austin