The Mac ness of it all!

nights backdrop, originally uploaded by Paul Grand.

Thursday night I had meltdown with my 24" Imac, I'd maxed out on both my HD internal memory and externals. I was just going through old pictures on the externals and viewing each one when everything froze, nothing was click-able, though the web worked fine.
I rebooted and cleared out the cache etc several times and then left it overnight, but not before having discovered I had 300GB of memory left on my Ex HD, so I turned on 'Time Machine' and left it a couple of hours backing up.

Next day after finding it was all still frozen I decided to bite the bullet,with Re-formatting...O_O
This time I clicked on an option that said 'Save your old system files' and then left it an hour or so to see If I'd lost all this years work....
After a restart I was amazed to see all the file crap on my screen reappear and was once again working! :-)
Thus, I then checked the backed up files on the external to find to my relief it had indeed backed up:-)

So just to cover myself I'm now backing up all important files of finished work onto a third external HD before deleting and have so far, recovered 80 gigs of space back on the mac...When everything is backed up,
I'll re-format again but this time a full reformat, to get the Mac back to its newish-old self...

PS.
The first page flickr explore winning picture, shown above, was just one that could have been lost forever, had the 'Time Machine' malfunctioned and the Mac having had a full reformat.