The Macbook Rises!

This Macbook has been sitting in a corner, plugged in, for 3.05 years (1,116 days).  Yep, you read that right!  Since I bought an external hard drive, I decided today to see if the Macbook was still running, and if so, to see if I could back up the files on it to the external drive.

Spoiler alert: I backed up the files!  It took a bit more work than I thought, but overall it was pretty easy to do.  I brought the laptop out to my work area and plugged it in, and then plugged in the USB cable for the external drive.

While I could see the files on the drive at this point, it was marked as read-only.  The culprit?  Formatting.  But, the Mac (as usual) makes it easy by providing the user a hyperlink to the “read only” mode marker.  Clicking this brought up a screen prompting me to download a piece of software from Paragon Software, which would allow me to write to the drive.  A few minutes later, I was up and running.

Then, over the next 2 hours, the Macbook spent its time copying files to the external drive.  Now I’ve got a solid backup of all the crap I stored on that laptop for 7 years, until I got a new computer.

The ticker?  The “uptime” of the computer was 1,116 days.  Sitting idle, yes, but still running.  I opened the lid and after logging in, I was prompted with the same. exact. desktop. I used to use every day.  All my programs were still running.  Simply amazing!  I ran a software update which required a system restart, so it’s reset the counter.  For what it’s worth, it’s a mid-2009 Macbook Pro 13″, and other than a faulty touchpad (doesn’t register clicks) and a “Service Battery” message, it’s still just as functional as it was when I got it 10 years ago.

Anyway, what’s the longest your laptop or computer has been running?

-John