I started tapering off of prednisone today, as planned. Unlike the first time I took it in 2016, I haven’t had any serious side effects so far (that time, I couldn’t sleep for days and took myself off before I went nuts).

The most interesting side effect has been that I’ve remembered many of my dreams – and they’ve been quite detailed. In one, I was at a carnival, waiting my turn to use a machine that painted certain parts of the body – it cost sixty cents to use, exact change only, and I can still sing the jingle it played! In another, I was very carefully cleaning a cast-iron skillet (I didn’t say the dreams were all interesting!).

The disk problems I wrote about yesterday were in my thoughts during the night last night – I’m not sure if I was awake or asleep, though. But this morning, I had a good idea about why I couldn’t copy between disks on my laptop: it was a power problem.

The portable disks I had (both the old and new) have “USB 3 Micro B” sockets and came with cables which plug into that port on the disk and into a regular old USB A port on the computer. But a modern Mac laptop only has USB C ports, so I have a hub attached to give me two USB A ports, and I plugged one disk into each port.

It Turns Out™ that my hub only provides 5 watts to be split between the two ports; neither Seagate nor Western Digital says how much power their disks need, but a little searching shows that each of them need about 2 watts when reading and 4 when writing. That’s more than the hub could supply, which explains why the disk that I was writing to clicked (as it lost and regained power) and wrote garbage to the disk.

When I plugged the disks into my Mac mini last night to try one more time, each disk could draw all the power it needed, and the copying went smoothly (and yes, I did verify the copy), so now I’m set.

If I’d had a USB Micro B to USB C cable, I would have plugged one of the disks directly into the laptop in the first place and had no problem. But Western Digital only supplies that cable with the Mac version of the drive; I bought the PC version and reformatted it, saving $15 in the process – it was a painful way to save $15!

And there was coffee! The old Hario grinder still works, and the new grinder works even better.

I wish I could say the same about other technology; after posting last night, I discovered that Time Machine had stopped working on my office computer – 10 days ago. And that the Time Machine partition couldn’t be repaired. The other two partitions on that disk seem OK, but it’s a 3-year-old disk, so I’m not terribly surprised that it needs replacing.

I’d had good luck with Western Digital My Passport drives of late, so we bought one at Office Depot. I hooked it up, reformatted it to APFS, and began to copy my first batch of files to it. It made clicking noises and the system complained about write errors. Lots of them.

OK, some drives are bad out-of-the-box; that’s one reason I prefer to buy them in person. Back to Office Depot for a no-hassle swap.

The copy process goes smoothly for 20 minutes. Then I think I hear a click. But there are no errors shown on the log, so I let it keep going. There were more clicks. And more errors – things like “could not stat file” (on new drive). This is not a good sign.

I thought I might have a bad cable, so I hooked the drive up to a known good cable and restarted the copy. More errors.

I moved the drive to the Mac I really want to use it on, connecting it directly to the system instead of through a USB hub. The drive shows up in Disk Utility as “USB External APFS Physical Store” and as an uninitialized “AppleAPFSMedia” volume. Which I can’t initialize.

I installed the Western Digital utilities, ran a complete drive scan, let it completely erase the disk, and I was then able to reformat it as APFS using the normal Mac Disk Utility program.

I’m trying the copy again; so far, no errors, but it’s going to take several hours – and then I have another partition to copy. And then I can set up Time Machine again.

In the middle of this whole process, we took our evening walk and saw this bird – I liked the way it was illuminated by the soon-to-set sun.