I read once that there are two types of people:
Those who one day lose everything on their hard drive
and
those who one day lose everything on their hard drive.
This weekend I fit both groups.
I was hooking up a 7 Port Hub and when I plugged my laptop back up, it threw a circuit breaker in my house. When I switched the circuit back on and turned on the laptop, I had no hard drive!
I lost all the work I did on Saturday for a forthcoming Leadership Network Missional Renaissance article.
But it could have been much, much worse. I did not lose the vast majority of 22 years of personal computing because I backup my data every evening losing the inexpensive and easy-to-use Second Copy utility. I backup my USA TODAY laptop every morning and my personal laptop late every evening automatically using this tool. And I always extend the warranty on my computers when I purchase them so I should have a brand new hard drive in a few days.
So if you don’t back up your data on a regular basis, please start!
rule of thumb…
* always back up your data before making any hardware or software changes.
* stay in the moment, forget the security of the past
this has happened to me too many times…and i still don’t do the above consistently!
lessons ive learned;
* what was i thinking/feeling right before i made any changes?
* did that little voice tell me to backup and i ignored it?
* after i realized i lost my data, what was the first thing it thought of?
* did losing my data make me ask if i really needed or wanted the stuff i lost?
ohhh…sorry for your loss!
Looks like a good topic for http://digital.leadnet.org/ to pick up.
I use http://www.mozy.com which is an online solution.
Thanks for the reminder. It is all true. All hard drives crash. I don’t care if it is a Mac or a PC. Though the new solid state/flash type drives are promising in this area. No moving parts so they might be crash proof. I’m not exactly sure. They are super expensive though. Thanks Stephen.
Stephen,
I had a similar situation… I use my PowerMac G5 as my home theaer PC, and that means it’s in the den where it’s cheese-grater grill sucks in a lot more dust, dirt, and grime.
That might explain why the 500GB WD drive I use for booting it went belly-up last week!
Luckily, I’ve been religiously using Time Machine for backups, so I have everything ready to be restored when I get back from my trip… but let me tell you, it was scary.
Last year, I heard a fan inside my computer start to grind, so I went to great trouble and replaced the fan on my hard drive, only to realize afterward that it was the fan on my video card that was creaking instead.
Then, a few months ago, I deduced that either my drive or OS had finally crashed, so I backed up with I could, wiped my drive, and started over from scratch. A HUGE job, and never was able to retrieve some 20,000 e-mails, among other things.
Only after all that did I get into the box and find that it had nothing to do with my drive or OS at all; that same fan on my video card had popped out of one socket, and the card had just fried.
Not sure why I’m sharing this, except… just to say hello!