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iFail

27 June 2009 4 Comments
iFail

I had something occur the other night that could definitely fit into the category, “Computer User’s Worst Nightmare.”

When I went to my desktop computer and tried to do something, I found that it was off instead of asleep.  That in itself wasn’t so unusual: we’d had storms recently, and a brief power interruption.  But when I tried to turn the computer back on, that’s when all cyberhell broke loose.

Instead of the nice desktop picture that should have appeared, a shot of Archie and I in front of the Golden Gate bridge, I got a gray acreen with a blinking question mark.

It doesn’t take a computer expert, or even a Mac expert, to know that this is very, very bad.

In my particular case, it turned out to be as bad as it could possibly be:  my hard drive had suffered a “head crash,” which means that the read/write head came crashing down on the magnetic disk, doing irreperable damage.  The computer expert from whom I bought the computer along with, thankfully, an AppleCare extended warranty package, said that salvaging data from such a catastrophe was beyond their abilities.

He referred me to a third-party company that provided an estimate for such services:  for between $1,600 and $2,400, they would take the disk drive apart, rebuild the media itself into another drive chasis, and salvage every scrap of surviving data that they could their electronic fingers on.  If I had that kind of money sitting around doing nothing, I don’t think I’d spend it.  Since I don’t, thankfully, I don’t have to toil over how much the majority of my iPhoto library, last year’s tax records and Firefox bookmarks are worth.

It royally sucks that I’ve lost a great deal of the photos I’ve taken over the past year and a half or so, including some pictures with my closest friends.  In some cases, though, I’ve used some of them as desktop images or screen saver images, and I’ve run a few of them here and have saved others elsewhere for future use.

It turns out that such catastrophic disk failures are not as uncommon as I thought they were.  It also turns out, according to the expert I’ve dealt with, that since this is my first head crash ever, and I’ve had Apple computers since the old Apple IIc days, that I’ve been extremely fortunate.

My not-so-happy Mac will be happy again by early next week, and I think I’ll actually start making use of that nifty little “Time Machine” automatic backup feature that I never really tried before.

Insert your own “remember to always, always, always back up your data” public service announcement here.

4 Comments »

  • otowi said:

    I had a power supply failure earlier this year – one day my computer had just died – wouldn’t turn on at all – not even the sad Mac. It was fixable, however. BUT, that led me to eventually invest in Carbonite – I recommend you check into it – it is a storage service that automatically backs up off site somewhere – so you don’t have to think about it, and it can be accessed via Internet, i.e. a different computer, should something go wrong.

    # 27 June 2009 at 3:31 pm
  • Patrick (author) said:

    You know, Otowi, part of me likes the idea of having everything backed up at a different location just so that if there was a break-in or fire, and I lost the computer itself, there’d be no danger of me losing the data.

    At the same time, I don’t know that I’m all that wild about the notion of my stuff going “off site somewhere.” I’d to know where that “somewhere” is and who, besides me, has access to it. Okay, I admit it: I’m VERY paranoid. But then, in this day and age, being paranoid about my private data isn’t necessarily a bad thing, is it? :)

    # 27 June 2009 at 4:09 pm
  • Astaryth said:

    My laptop made a funny noise the other afternoon (I think it is the fan and will be taking it in to have it checked this week), and in fear I immediately backed up all of my pictures and other docs onto my external harddrive. I don’t do ‘full backups’, but do keep an external harddrrive with all of my pictures and saved files on it that is -supposed- to be kept backed up so that if I do have a failure I only lose a few things………. But the reality is that often I go several months between actually dragging it out and doing it. I don’t bother with full backups because I have all of my programs that I can re-install and all that I feel is really important are the saved files that are unique. Eh, so far it has worked for me, but I figure at some point I will probably lose things due to my laziness :(

    # 27 June 2009 at 6:17 pm
  • Woody said:

    TimeMachine is great but it backs up to another hard drive which can also fail. I understand your concern about backing up “off site.” However I once lost all the pictures from a 4-year-old’s birthday party. Now I back up locally and off-site. I suggest you look into Amazon’s service. 15 cents a GB. You can find it here, http://www.jungledisk.com/.

    # 28 June 2009 at 8:57 pm

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