What to do if biber stops working on MacOS X

Yesterday evening I ran into a bit of a problem when I tried building my latex document that uses biblatex/biber. For some reason, biber would not generate any output but fail with

Olivers-MacBook-Air:~ porten$ biber
data source /var/folders/5c/y7ssnfgj2fz1fnx1gz_z7ng80000gn/T/par-porten/cache-5a7f3069e2a4d51fd3557003fc55ec74c554c947//inc/lib/Biber/LaTeX/recode_data.xml not found in .
Compilation failed in require at Biber/Utils.pm line 21.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at Biber/Utils.pm line 21.
Compilation failed in require at Biber/Internals.pm line 8.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at Biber/Internals.pm line 8.
Compilation failed in require at (eval 22) line 2.
    ...propagated at /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.14.1/base.pm line 94.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at Biber.pm line 5.
Compilation failed in require at script/biber-darwin line 20.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at script/biber-darwin line 20.

Now, what fixes this is simply deleting the par cache:

sudo rm -rf /var/folders/5c/y7ssnfgj2fz1fnx1gz_z7ng80000gn/T/par-porten/

Sources:

• Andrew Goldstone’s Blog