This past weekend, Amy was pushing to get a .Mac account. The main reason was so our iCalendar schedules could be shared. Mine has been so nutty this semester, it has been difficult to keep up. And since we replaced a broken modem with a new one — picking up a wireless router at the same time — my use of the “family” computer has been minimal. In fact, other than shutting off a running iTunes, this has been the longest I have used this iMac in months.
Why am I using it now? Funny story. My laptop died.
OK, upon further reflection, not so funny. I’m hoping my problem isn’t this situation, but I have all the same symptoms. This, from a computer already suffering a troubled life (). Zapping PRAM happens, but not very quickly and with no improvement. I haven’t tried booting up from another CD yet, but it is the clicking noises that have me worried. I have 48 more minutes to wait until MacExperience opens, but even under best-case conditions (where my hard drive is dying, not dead) I’m still looking at a long day of data backup and/or recovery.
A great way to spend a snow day.
Here’s just a highlight of the things I may have just lost:
- Literature Research, including everything on my CHI Doctoral Consortium entry, blogging, complex design, etc. Pretty much any paper written this semester.
- Grades for HCI/d 2, all of which are recoverable but not without a great investment of time (It took about 3-4 hours just to sort through the peer reviews for 31 students, for example)
- All of my unconference docs
- Email archive, the stuff not found on the IU account right this moment
- My calendar for the coming semester, which is the piece of confusion that prompted Amy’s concern in the first place
My head hurts to think of more.
I don’t have great backup behavior. I had to do it (spent a couple days at it) when I got the computer last June. So at worst case, I still have that information on an external hard drive. More than likely, I also have a recent backup before I dropped off my computer to be repaired in the fall (heck, maybe MacExperience still has the data they copied as a backup to the backup), and I’d have some recent documents I used while working on the older PC laptop. That’s probably it, though. The biggest losses are probably the PDFs upon PDFs that accumulated into nice little specific folders, the foundation of everything I was planning to do this semester.
The irony of the .Mac exploratory committee is that it wouldn’t have helped. Yes, maybe I’d have my calendar data safely stored elsewhere, and all those iTunes taken from my own buried cache of CDs wouldn’t have to be re-entered. But 1 GB? (Probably less in the trial version we have now.) For two computers? Naw. However, the act of getting things ready for that would have prompted me to backup, an activity I probably would have done last night had I not been comatose from staying up all night working Sunday-Monday. This is my life: a series of good intentions and no follow-through.
Perhaps the day will surprise me.
3 replies on “No one watching my back(up)”
Death was confirmed. I am currently waiting to hear back from the data recovery folks at a couple of places to see if the pricetags on their services make this a worthwhile endeavor.
I tried to boot from a CD, but either the disk I put in wasn’t a boot disc, or the CD drive is out, too. (Josh at MacExperience says that sometimes happens on these Macs; bad HD, bad CD.) Of course, there also doesn’t seem to be a little ejector hole, either, so my CD is now trapped in the machine.
My last, best hope for a smooth transition away from my Mac is this gem about freezing the hard drive. If it works, 20-30 minutes should be enough time for me to backup my most pressing bits. Of course, there is also this fine print about the process that comes from a list of myths about data recovery.
The danger is not only by not backing up, but also when you think you have backed up, and you really have not!!!
It happens regularly especially when you are dealing with backup tapes.
If your data is not so huge I would back up on DVDs, otherwise I would use a well ventilated external drive (with SATA) HDD and not an IDE HDD as IDE drives were originally designed for casual use, read the lower part of the page on this link http://www.unirecovery.co.uk/disk.php
Thanks for the input. I got a very cheap USB drive whose only purpose in life is to hold regular data dumps of everything on my computers. That, added to a firewire HD that used to get a lot more use, but now it too spends most of its live offline. I’m hoping that will greatly reduce the chance of problems occurring.
The use of a thumb drive hasn’t been very good for me (especially now that I lost the thing! but I just don’t think to use it to copy files. I really need something that does the file backup automatically, but I may have to just make a more conscious effort to change my copy routines to make it more of a priority. $$$ is the big constraint here.